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Class_jl52/t 

Book 



Copyright N° 



COWRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Blue Stars and Gold 



Blue Stars and Gold 

For Every Home That Flies 
a Service Flag 



By 
WILLIAM E. BARTON, D.D., LL.D. 




The reilly & britton Co. 

Chicago 



1* 



Copyright, 19 18 

by 

The Reilly & Britton Co. 



Made in U. S. A. 



NOV k3 !bi3 

Blue Stars and Oold 

g>Cl.A508260 



PUBLISHER'S PREFACE 

The author of this book has four sons. The 
eldest of them — until recently the editor of a New 
York magazine — is devoting his entire time to the 
work of the Y. M. C. A. The other three have 
enlisted and are now serving in the fighting forces 
of their country. 

He is pastor of a church whose Roll of Honor 
bears more than a hundred names, and its service 
flag more than a hundred stars. He is, therefore, 
unusually qualified to inspire and comfort the fath- 
ers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts and 
wives of men at the front. He has visited camps 
where soldiers and sailors are assembled, and his 
messages to them have been most welcome. 

Part of the material in this volume is taken from 
addresses delivered by him to soldiers, sailors and 
their relatives, but most of it was written especially 
for this volume. It has been the purpose of the 
author, as also the wish of the publishers, that this 
should be less a book than a series of heart-to-heart 
talks with the readers, by a man whose own heart 
is deeply concerned in the present issues, and whose 

5 



6 Publisher's Preface 

clear conviction of right as well as his uncompro- 
mising patriotism are inspiring and reassuring. 

Dr. Barton is descended from a race of soldiers. 
His relations fought bravely in the Civil War, and 
his own memories go back to the closing events of 
that mighty struggle. His father's father carried 
his regiment's flag in the war of 1 8 1 2 ; his father's 
father's father was an officer in the Revolution, and 
Dr. Barton has his sword and his name. The 
father of this gallant Revolutionary soldier fell at 
Fort Du Quesne in 1755, fighting under George 
Washington. 

Dr. Barton has visited the countries now at war, 
having traveled extensively in Europe, including 
Greece, Turkey and the Balkans, and in Egypt, 
Palestine, and other lands where the war is now in 
progress. What he writes has behind it not only 
wide experience and many years of careful study, 
but also constant contact with the life of men and 
women who meet all the conditions which this war 
involves. 

The publishers commend this book to all homes 
that fly the service flag. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Flag in Our Window 1 1 

The Day He Marched Away 15 

Our Glorious Sons 2 4 

The Father and the Son 29 

Mothers of Men 3 1 

The Girl Who Will Never Have a 

Lover 37 

" The Kid Has Gone to the Colors " 41 

Why Must My Boy Go? 44 

Our Boys at Sea 49 

The Man Who Had Lost a Son 59 

The Stars in Our Flag 64 

New Stars 7° 

Is My Boy a Murderer? 75 

Will My Boy Return to Me? 82 

Our War Against War 87 

Can We Fight Without Hatred? 94 

The Religion of the Good Shepherd. . . 98 

The Health of Our Boys 103 

The Soul of a Soldier 107 

7 



8 Contents 

PAGE 

Things That Abide 113 

The Battle of Life 117 

Not Too Cheap a Peace 119 

God Is Love 123 

Spiritual Preparedness 127 

The Hazard of Faith 134 

Does God Care? 138 

Can God Share Our Sorrows? 143 

God Is Marching On 147 

The Trajectory of Our Prayers 153 

When the Ship Goes Down 158 

The Value and Significance of Life ... 164 

Making Death Significant 170 

" Somewhere " 176 

The Wayside Inns of Heaven 184 

Do You Believe in Immortality? 190 



A Collection of Prayers and Prayer 
Poems 197 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

Most of the poems quoted in this volume were 
clipped month by month from the magazines in 
which they appeared. In many cases they have 
already paid their compliment to the discernment 
of the editors by achieving a national popularity, 
and are now included either in volumes of poems 
published by their respective authors, or in col- 
lections of the poetry of the Great War. Some 
of the best poems in this volume have been taken 
from Over Here, a collection of his own war 
verse, by Edgar A. Guest. 

The Author wishes to acknowledge his indebt- 
edness for prose and verse selections included in 
this volume to The American Magazine, The 
Century, The Independent, The Survey, The New 
York Sun, The New York Times and The Boston 
Transcript. He also desires to thank the follow- 
ing authors, publishers and periodicals for their 
generosity in permitting him to use the copyrighted 
poems indicated: 

George H. Doran Company: — "Prayer of a Soldier in 
France," by Joyce Kilmer ; "A Prayer in War Time" and 
"Face to Face With Reality," by John Oxenham. 



10 Acknowledgments 



.^ j 



E. P. Dutton & Company: — "Soldiers of Freedom," by 
Katharine Lee Bates; "The Spires of Oxford," by Wini- 
fred M. Letts. 

The International Magazine Company: — "A Prayer," 
by Katharine Janeway Conger ; "A Prayer for Those Who 
Watch," by Theodosia Garrison; "Somehow," by Mar- 
garet E. Sangster; "Prayer for a World Hurt Sore" and 
"A Father's Prayer," by Margaret Widdemer. 

Lothrop, Lee & Shepard: — "Two Gods," by Sam 
Walter Foss, from Songs of the Average Man. 

The prayers are partly original and partly 
quoted. The Book of Common Prayer has been 
drawn upon, and also the Book of Common Wor- 
ship, prepared by a committee of which Henry 
Van Dyke was the principal editor. Most of 
these prayers have attained such standing that I 
have preferred not to alter them, but in a few 
cases they have been edited to adapt them more 
directly to present conditions. A considerable 
number of the prayers are original and have been 
written for this volume. I prefer to make this 
general acknowledgment rather than to give credit 
for particular prayers, for a prayer should be the 
personal possession of all those who are able to 
use it. W. E. B. 



THE FLAG IN OUR WINDOW 

I saw the service flag in your window, and that 
is why I have called on you. We need no other 
introduction, you and I, for we have great interests 
in common. 

There is a service flag in my window. 

It bears more than one star, for God has been 
good to me, and has given me more sons than one. 

"I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier." So runs 
a song that had brief popularity, and which still is 
quoted now and then. 

But we did rear our boys to be soldiers. 

We did not know that we were rearing them for 
this. But we reared them that they might con- 
tribute their best to the life of the world in their 
own generation, and this is the best they have to 
give. 

It is a solemn hour when the Son says, "To this 
end was I born, and for this cause came I into the 
world." 

Your sons and my sons have been saying that to 
us, and our hearts glow with solemn pride because 

ll 



12 Blue Stars and Gold 

they have discovered by what service and sacrifice 
they may serve their generation. 

So I have called upon you that we may talk 
together about our boys, yours and mine. 

You know that rather apt definition of an egotist. 
He is a man who is always talking about himself 
when you want to talk about yourself. But neither 
you nor I want to talk about ourselves just now. 
We are more interested in talking about our boys. 

We are not jealous, you and I. We are proud 
of our boys, you of yours and I of mine, and each 
of us of the other's. 

I have called that I might talk with the women 
to whom this war means so much of love and 
prayer and anxious waiting. The mothers, of 
course. They are always eager to hear some one 
talk about their sons, even more than they are to 
talk about them. 

I should like a quiet and earnest and cheerful lit- 
tle chat with the young wives of soldiers and sail- 
ors, and the sisters and the sweethearts of the boys 
who have gone away. 

"The Girl I Left Behind Me" is never long 
absent from the mind of the soldier or sailor, and 
she has a right to a share in the comfort and the 
glory of the present hour. 

And I want to talk with the fathers, for I also 
am a father. 

I have not called to lament the absence of your 



The Flag in Our Window 13 

boys. There are aspects of the situation that are 
lamentable. It is lamentable that there should be a 
war. But if there is to be a war, it is not lamenta- 
ble but glorious that there should be men willing to 
fight in it, on land and sea and in the air, who go 
forth with the noble spirit of our American young 
men. 

So I have called at your home where the service 
flag flies — the home that flies the blue star, that I 
may speak a little word of our mutual pride and 
hope — the home that flies the gold star, that I may 
say a word of comfort. 

Let my first word be this: You and I have 
entered into that deep and solemn and glorious 
experience of sacrifice which from the dawn of 
human history, and long before, has been eternal 
in the heart of God. 

Do you know what I mean by that? 

It is one of the most exalted experiences that can 
come to human life. 

A few months ago when Venus, the evening star, 
was making the western sky glorious just after the 
sun went down, a little boy was walking with his 
father. 

"See, Daddy," said the little fellow, "God has 
hung out His service flag!" 

And then the boy added reverently : 

"I think God must have a Son in the war." 

I think so, too. 



14 Blue Stars and Gold 

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, 
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. 
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, 
For God is marching on. 

God has a Son in this war, and so have you and I. 
The finest thing in this life is to have our great- 
est interests in common with God. 



THE DAY HE MARCHED AWAY 

What is a brass band for, if not to make a noise 
when we all feel that something ought to be said 
and no one knows just how to say it? Blessings 
rest upon the band for playing while we waited for 
the train that was so slow in coming, yet which 
came so soon and so inevitably! 

We saw the boys as they lined up in front of the 
town hall, and received their parting instructions 
from the chairman of the local committee. Our 
eyes followed them as they took up their baggage 
and fell in. Those suit cases looked very unmili- 
tary. They are presumably the "old kit bags" 
about which they sang. The boys were going to 
pack all their troubles in them and ship them home 
when they received their military outfits. 

Meantime, we were to "smile, smile, smile." 

It is said that a man can "smile and smile and 
be a villain." You and I know that a father and 
mother can smile and smile while their hearts 
throb. 

And the boys smiled and smiled. 

15 



16 Blue Stars and Gold 

Their kid brothers and the boy scouts ran along 
beside them, and violently took away their luggage 
and carried it for them. And we parents followed 
behind, or walked on the sidewalk, each of us try- 
ing to keep opposite our own boys. 

We'll be o-ver, we're coming o-ver, 

And we wont come back till it's o-ver, o-ver there. 

That was what the band played as the boys 
marched in the middle of the street and we walked 
abreast of them to the station. 

What manly fellows they were ! 

And among them all, there was none so fine as 
the boy who was our very own. 

Of course it was natural enough that other 
people should be interested in the other young men. 
We had no desire, you and I, that our boys, our 
very own boys, should receive a monopoly of the 
glory. But every one must have seen that there 
were no others really quite so fine as ours ! 

They lined up again in the open space in front 
of the station, and for five minutes we greeted 
them. They were kissed and admonished and 
charged to write home often. We said the few 
things that were left to say, and still the five 
minutes lagged. 

"Now, mother, wipe away your tears," said one 
young fellow of three-and-twenty. "There isn't a 



The Day He Marched Away 17 

thing to cry for, not a thing! We're all coming 
back, every one of us ! You take it from me, we're 
all coming back!" 

There is nothing more beautiful or indeed more 
pathetic than the way in which a mother of forty- 
six looks up at her boy of twenty-three who has 
already shown his ability to conquer the world by 
going out and earning eighteen dollars a week, and 
tries to make herself believe that he knows more 
than she does. 

"There isn't a thing to worry about, mother; not 
a thing! They feed us well. We have nice, dry 
places to sleep — there isn't a thing to worry about !" 

With such words youth has gone forth to war 
since the world was young. 

Katharine Lee Bates, whose great hymn, "O 
beautiful, far, spacious skies," has already been 
recognized as one of our noblest national songs, 
has written worthily of the care-free pose of these 
boys of ours on the day when they marched away 
from us. 

They veiled their souls with laughter 

And many a mocking pose, 
These lads who follow after 

Wherever Freedom goes; 
These lads we used to censure 

For levity and ease, 
On Freedom's high adventure 

Go shining overseas. 



18 Blue Stars and Gold 

Our springing tears adore them, 

These boys at school and play, 
Fair-fortuned years before them, 

Alas! but yesterday; 
Divine with sudden splendor 

— Oh, how our eyes were blind ! — 
In careless self-surrender 

They battle for mankind. 

Soldiers of Freedom ! Gleaming 

And golden they depart, 
Transfigured by the dreaming 

Of boyhood's hidden heart. 
Her lovers they confess them 

And, rushing on her foes, 
Toss her their youth — God bless them ! — 

As lightly as a rose. 

SOLDIERS OF FREEDOM 

by Katharine Lee Bates. 

The five minutes are up, and the chairman of the 
local board calls on the boys to fall in. 

"Parents and friends will be admitted to the 
south platform. No one will be admitted to the 
north platform except the enlisted men, and those 
wearing badges." 

We climb the steps to the north platform — the 
boys, the band, a little group of Grand Army men 
with their flag, the local board, the local Y. M. C. 
A. secretary, and I. No matter how I got in with 
them; I was there, and I intend to be there, when- 



The Day He Marched Away 19 

ever a group of the boys go from my town. I shall 
be one of the last to greet them. 

"God bless you, boys ! We have great faith in 
you ! Be brave ; be clean ; be true to your country 
and your homes and your God! We trust you!" 

The words are commonplace enough, but the 
privilege of speaking them is priceless. 

The two platforms face each other like two 
lines of trenches, with a No Man's Land of rail- 
road tracks between, and I can see the faces on 
both sides. 

If only some one could invent a trench mortar 
that would carry across those tracks the messages 
that are in the hearts of those on either side ! 

Already the great gulf is fixed between us and 
our boys. Now it is only the width of the inter- 
vening tracks, but it will widen to the breadth of the 
ocean. 

Thank God we can send our good wishes and 
our prayers across ! The heart knows how to 
bridge the widest gulf. 

How long that train is coming! 

Here it comes ! Good-bye ! Good-bye ! 

No, it is not our train. It is an express, and does 
not stop. Thank God for a few minutes more ! 

A girl makes her way to the front of the op- 
posite platform and starts a song, "Keep the home 
fires burning." We sing, not because we feel like 
it, but it gives us something to do. 



20 Blue Stars and Gold 

Then another song, but we do not get far with it. 
Here comes the train ! 

Another series of good-byes are shot across No 
Man's Land. 

Another false alarm. Who could have imagined 
there were so many trains? 

The strain is growing on both platforms. 

We try to sing, and give it up. 

A few jokes are hurled back and forth, but they 
are what the boys in the trenches call "duds." 
They do not explode. 

Thank God for the band ! 

When the band plays, we have an excuse to keep 
still. 

And yet, we have so much to say, if only we could 
say it ! 

Here comes the train, at last. More good-byes ! 
This time we are off ! 

But no, it is Section One of our train, already 
filled at stations farther up the road. The boys in 
these cars have just been through what we are 
going through. They crowd to the windows and 
wave and yell at us, and we wave and yell back. 

But the next train is really ours. The boys go 
aboard, and rush to the other side of the train, that 
they may wave their last good-byes from the win- 
dows on that side where their loved ones are. 

The band plays again. The train starts slowly. 
It has gone. 



The Day He Marched Away 21 

From the opposite platform the whole crowd 
passes down. 

Not one is missing of the hundreds who climbed 
the stairs to the platform. But on our side, just 
the local board, and the band, and the Grand Army 
men with the flag, come down, and the Y. M. C. A. 
man and I. 

The boys have gone. 

And they won't come back till it's over, over 
there. 



The Little Star in the Window 

By John Jerome Rooney 

There's a little star in the window of the house across the 

way, 

A little star, red bordered, on a ground of pearly white ; 

I can see its gleam at evening ; it is bright at dawn of day, 

And I know it has been shining through the long and 

dismal night. 

The folks who pass the window on the busy city street, 

I often notice, turn a glance before they hurry by, 
And one, a gray-haired woman, made curtsey low and 
sweet, 
While something like a teardrop was glistening in her 
eye. 

And yesterday an aged man, by life's stern battle spent, 
His empty coat sleeve hanging down, a witness sadly 
mute, 
Gave one swift look and halted — his form full height, 
unbent — 
And ere he passed his hand came up in soldierly salute. 

The little star in the window is aflame with living fire, 
For it was lit at the hearthstone where a lonely mother 
waits ; 

22 



The Little Star in the Window 23 

And she has stained its crimson with the glow of her heart's 
desire, 
And brightened its pearl white heaven beyond the world's 
dark hates. 

The star shall shine through the battle when the shafts of 
death are hurled ; 
It shall shine through the long night watches in the fore- 
most trenches' line; 
Over the waste of waters, and beyond the verge of the 
world, 
Like the guiding Star of the Magi its blessed rays shall 
shine. 

The little star in the window shall beacon your boy's return 
As his eyes are set to the homeland, when the call of the 
guns shall cease ; 
In the Flag's high constellation through the ages it shall 
burn, 
A pledge of his heart's devotion, a sign of his people's 
peace. 



OUR GLORIOUS SONS 

Some verses in the Bible come to us now with 
new meanings. There is one prayer of Jesus to 
His Father which I should never have thought of 
using to express the desire of a boy of to-day and 
addressed to his earthly father, but it comes to me 
now that this is one of the real uses of the Bible. 
The words are those which Jesus uttered when He 
was preparing for the Cross and the Crown, 
"Father, the hour is come ; glorify thy Son, that thy 
Son also may glorify Thee." 

Thousands of American boys are saying that to 
their fathers now. They are not asking for glory 
in any tawdry sense; they are uncomfortable if 
very much fuss is made over them; but they are 
asking that they may receive from their fathers not 
only military equipment but a patriotic preparation 
for what they have felt called to undertake. 

Jesus was preparing himself for His supreme 
sacrifice. He wanted God's approbation, a sense 
of his Fatherly support, that He might to the full- 

24 



Our Glorious Sons 25 

est degree promote the honor of His Father. He 
was asking God for a glory greater than ever had 
been given to the Carpenter of Nazareth. He did 
not want to go to His crucifixion with no other 
glory than that of His own noble manhood; He 
wanted a sense of the divine companionship. 

Shall we doubt our right to apply the text to our 
own situation? Our boys are asking the glory of 
confidence, of affection and of sacrificial patriotism, 
that they may glorify their fathers, and their 
father's God. All over the land boys are coming 
to their fathers, and saying, in the most common- 
place way possible, "Father, I'm going." And the 
fathers are saying, "Go, my boy. If I were your 
age, I would go." They do not talk much about it. 
They talk of everything except what they feel 
most; but in their silence and their talk of other 
things is the prayer of the son, "Father, the hour 
is come ; glorify thy son that thy son may glorify 
thee." 

What had we ever given to these boys to prepare 
them for this supreme sacrifice? We had trained 
them for business. They were not apparently over- 
idealistic. Their ideals had been apparently 
commercial, and we had given them these ideals. 
We sometimes asked whether our schools were a 
failure, our churches a failure, our whole system of 
preparing men for life a failure, and now our sys- 
tem and its product have come to the test. We 



26 Blue Stars and Gold 

wonder that these boys should now display the 
qualities which we find in them. We had taught 
them "Safety First," and they have answered, 

'Tis man's perdition to be safe, 
When for the truth he ought to die. 

We have taught them not to be altogether negli- 
gent of prudential considerations, and they have 
answered in terms that remind us of the words of 
Emerson: 

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, "Thou must," 

The youth replies, "I can." 

We say to them, "Ye know not what ye ask. 
Are ye able to drink of the cup which the soldiers 
and the martyrs drink?" 

And they answer, "We are able." 

Many a father now knows how Abraham felt 
when he took his beloved son, Isaac, and offered 
him on the altar of sacrifice. Many a father before 
this war is over will sob the lament of David, 
"Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my 
son, my son." But out of the cloud of sorrow will 
sound forth the words of chastened pride, "This is 
my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." 



Our Glorious Sons 27 

Some of us wear with pardonable pride the but- 
ton of the Sons of the American Revolution and 
all of us honor the brave old men who as boys 
risked their lives for their country fifty years ago. 
To this honor, which we gladly bestow upon our 
fathers, we now add this, that we glorify our sons. 
Harry Lauder still sings his merry Scotch songs. 
But to them he now adds one of his own composi- 
tion: 

The days are long, the nights are drear, 

The anguish breaks my heart, 
But, Oh, I'm proud my one and only 

Laddie did his part! 
For God knows best; His will be done; 

His grace does me employ; 
I do believe I'll meet again 

My one and only boy. 

We must glorify the sons of the immigrant with 
a new sense of the value of American citizenship. 
We can no longer have two kinds of citizenship in 
America. The plea that we must have Sabbath 
desecration and open saloons to win the German 
vote is not going to be popular. If foreigners want 
what they left in Europe, there are ways back; but 
so long as they remain here, there are to be no 
German- Americans. 

And how are our sons to glorify us ? 

They will give to us a new definition of patriot- 



28 Blue Stars and Gold 

ism, a new conception of the worth of sacrifice. 
When they come back, there will be more men 
ready for spiritual as over against material ends 
in life. The fatherhood of America will be glori- 
fied in its sonship. 



THE FATHER AND THE SON 

Fathers are shy in the presence of their sons. 
Mothers get nearer to the boys as a rule than fath- 
ers do. It is not that fathers love their sons less 
than mothers, but they feel a certain sense of shy- 
ness in the presence of their big boys. They have 
that strange awe that is hinted at in the book of 
Genesis when it is said, "The man has become as 
one of us, knowing good and evil." 

What does the average father say to his boy just 
before he goes off to war? Very little of what he 
really thinks or means to say. Fathers are almost 
as laconic as the old man of whom James Whit- 
comb Riley wrote, who was "all wrapped up" in 
his boy Jim, but whose whole series of partings 
were expressed in a single sentence: "Good-bye, 
Jim; take keer of yourse'f I" 

Old man never had much to say — 

'Ceptin' to Jim ; 
And Jim was the wildest boy he had, 

And the old man jes' wrapped up in him! 
29 



30 Blue Stars and Gold 

Never heerd him speak but once 
Er twice in my life — and first time was 
When the army broke out, and Jim he went, 
The old man backin' him, fer three months; 
And all 'at I heerd the old man say 
Was, jes' as we turned to start way: 
"Well, good-bye, Jim; 
Take keer of yourse'f 1" 

Some of us fathers who have better developed 
powers of expression than the old man of whom 
Riley writes, really do in our way just about what 
he did in his. We have great messages that we feel 
like uttering to our boys, but for the most part we 
leave them unspoken. 

And now that they have gone from us, we go 
about our work and do not say very much about 
them. We are more reticent than women, and 
whether we ought to be proud of it or ashamed of 
it, we need not now discuss. But we fathers feel. 
Not everybody understands us; we do not always 
understand ourselves. But not even their mothers 
love our boys more than we fathers do. 



MOTHERS OF MEN 

It is said that sons inherit the traits that most 
distinguish them more through their mothers, and 
daughters through their fathers. I believe there is 
no recognized scientific data on which this impres- 
sion can be said to rest. But there is something 
wonderfully beautiful about the mutual love of 
father and daughter, and the reciprocal affection of 
mother and son. 

The mother of James and John came to Jesus 
and asked of Him that her two sons might sit, the 
one on His right hand and the other on His left, 
in his kingdom. 

That was just like a mother. 

A foolish mother, do you say? 

Let it go at that. All mothers are foolish in 
that way. 

They say, with Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, 
"These are my jewels." They desire no greater 
thing for themselves than this, that they may see 
their sons honorable and honored. 

31 



32 Blue Stars and Gold 

These arc they who in time of war say with the 
Spartan mother, "Come home bearing thy shield, 
or upon it." 

Joaquin Miller knew who were the real soldiers 
when he wrote his poem about the bravest battle : 

The bravest battle that was ever fought, 
Shall I tell you where and when ? 
On the maps of the world you will find it not ; 
'Twas fought by the mothers of men. 

Nay, not with cannon, or battle-shot, 
With sword, or nobler pen ; 
Nay, not with eloquent word or thought, 
From mouths of wonderful men. 

But deep in a walled-up woman's heart, 
Of woman that would not yield, 
But bravely, silently bore her part — 
Lo — there is that battlefield. 

No marshaling troop, no bivouac song ; 
No banners to gleam and wave ! 
But oh ! these battles they last so long — 
From boyhood to the grave! 

Oh ! ye with banners and battle-shot, 
And soldier to shout and praise, 
I tell you the kingliest victories fought, 
Are fought in these silent ways. 



Mothers of Men 33 

Stephen Phillips has recently written of that 
soldier quality in women which was never more 
truly manifest than in this present war: 

Splendid the onrush and the charging cheer, 
Yet glorious, too, to check the coming tear. 
The doubt by night to stifle, through the day 
The deep alarm not outwardly betray. 

Heroes are ye, who but the sob repress ; 

Your victory dumb is victory no less. 

We trace in St. Augustine the influence of his 
mother Monica, who reclaimed him from heathen 
philosophy and an immoral youth, and made him 
one of the greatest fathers of the Latin Church. 
We see in Susannah Wesley the determining fac- 
tors in the life of her two great sons, who preached 
and sang the Gospel around the world. That same 
influence, with childhood teaching and with prayer 
that daily follows over ocean and "over the top," 
inspires and enobles the life of our soldiers and 
sailors and aviators. 

And when the battle has been fought, and the 
news comes back that the victory has been won, but 
at terrible cost — ah, then we shall know what they 
meant who told us that no bullet ever kills a man 
upon the battlefield but it speeds on and finds some- 
where the heart of a woman. 

When Victor Immanuel was fighting to free 
Italy in 1861, Laura Savio, a patriot and a poetess, 



34 Blue Stars and Gold 

was writing her noblest lines to aid the cause, and 
beside her poems, those children of her brain, she 
gave her two sons. One of them was killed at 
Ancona and one at Gaeta. Who could interpret 
to the world what that mother felt in her mingled 
sorrow for her sons and joy in free Italia? An 
English woman living in Italy, Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning, did it as no man could have done it: 

Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east, 
And one of them shot in the west by the sea ! 

Dead ! Both my boys ! When you sit at the feast, 

And are wanting a great song for Italy free, 

Let none look at me! 



Then she pours out her mother's sorrow and her 
mother's memories, and thinks of the national joy 
in its awful contrast with her incurable sorrow, and 
how she prepared that sorrow for herself by teach- 
ing her boys to expel the tyrants and bring in free- 
dom: 

When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee, 

When your flag takes all heaven for its white, green and 
red, 
When you have your country from mountain to sea, 
When King Victor has Italy's crown on his head 
(And / have my dead) — 



Mothers of Men 35 

What then? Do not mock me. Ah, ring your bells low, 
And burn your lights faintly! My country is there. 

Above the star pricked by the last peak of snow: 
My Italy's there, with my brave civic Pair, 
To disfranchise despair. 

Mary, the mother of Jesus, knew the pride and 
joy and sorrow which together spell motherhood. 
The angel told her that a sword was to pierce her 
own heart in the fulfilment of the promise of her 
maternity. If motherhood eost less, it would be 
worth less. 

I doubt if the world ever saw a nobler body of 
mothers than those who just now are sending their 
sons to the front from America. In intelligence 
and patriotic fervor they stand foremost among 
the mothers of the world; and this is the supreme 
test of their motherhood, that they have given to 
the world, for this hour, such sons. 



The Mother Faith 

By Edgar A. Guest 

Little mother, life's adventure calls your boy away, 
Yet he will return to you on some brighter day ; 
Dry your tears and cease to sigh, keep your mother smile, 
Brave and strong he will come back in a little while. 

Little mother, heed them not — they who preach despair — 
You shall have your boy again, brave and oh, so fair! 
Life has need of him to-day, but with victory won, 
Safely life shall bring to you once again your son. 

Little mother, keep the faith : not to death he goes ; 
Share with him the joy of worth that your soldier knows. 
He is giving to the Flag all that man can give, 
And if you believe he will, surely he will live. 

Little mother, through the night of his absence long, 
Never cease to think of him — brave and well and strong ; 
You shall know his kiss again, you shall see his smile, 
For your boy shall come to you in a little while. 



36 



THE GIRL WHO WILL NEVER HAVE A 
LOVER 

Every one else is receiving sympathy, but no one 
knows that she also deserves it. 

Other women have sent to the war a son, a 
brother, a husband, a lover. 

So far as she knows, she has sent no one. Yet 
her lover is among those who have gone to the 
front, and he is never coming back. 

They will call her an old maid, and if that is the 
proper name, then that is what she will be. But in 
her heart she is a wife and mother. She knows 
that she has in her the capacity to be both. 

Her heart yearns for the lover whom she never 
had. 

Her arms are empty of the children that were 
never born. 

Among the many thousands of brave young fel- 
lows who went to France and will not return, was 
one who would have loved her had he lived. 

And she never met him. 

37 



38 Blue Stars and Gold 

Or if she did, his love was latent and not yet 
confessed. 

She waved her handkerchief at all the boys who 
left her town, for she knew them all, and they all 
knew her, and respected her. But among them 
there was no one of whom she could say that she 
loved him, or that he had spoken love to her. 

So she will go on in life alone. 

In a way she will be more lonely than the mother 
whose son lies buried in France, for the mother 
had her son, and has her memories, and she has 
his grave to think of, even if she never sees it. 

She will be more lonely than the woman who 
gave her husband, for that other woman has her 
rosary of happy hours that were spent with him, 
and perhaps she has her children. 

But this other war-widow has only her solitude. 

If among the tens of thousands of graves in 
Flanders and Picardy, there were only one that she 
might claim, it would be worth the crossing of the 
ocean just to drop a flower upon it. But no one 
grave belongs to her. 

Hers is the sorrow of having lost without know- 
ing when and how she lost. 

Other women can say, "My son laid down his 
life for his country;" "My husband died for the 
flag ;" "My lover was killed, bravely fighting." She 
can say nothing, because he said nothing to her. 

Of course she has not known the actual sorrow 



The Girl Who Will Never Have a Lover 39 

of parting, or the personal anxiety that comes from 
having loved and watched for a particular brother 
or husband or lover. Some of the keenness of per- 
sonal grief is spared to her. 

But she also is among the ones who have given 
all they had to give. 

Though she wear no widow's veil, she is among 
the war-widows. 

The man whom she would have married, the 
man who would have come back and claimed her as 
his wife, died before he knew that he loved her, 
before she knew that she loved him. 

And no one can console her, for no one knows. 

Even she does not know, and that is part of the 
tragedy of it. 

But she is among those who have made the 
greatest sacrifice that war demands of loyal and 
loving hearts. 

She has surrendered the hope she might have had 
of having a lover and a husband and children of 
her own. Let reverent place be made for her 
among those who have broken the alabaster box 
and given of their best. 

We had a letter recently from a dear friend, a 
young woman we have known for many years. 

She was sixteen years of age when we first knew 
her, thirty years ago. 

I do not know how old she is now. 

It is none of my business, and I am too much a 



40 Blue Stars and Gold 

gentleman to attempt to learn by process of arith- 
metic or otherwise. To us she is the same dear 
girl whom we have known and loved, and whose 
sorrows and joys we have shared. 

She wrote of the war, and of the neighbors who 
were sending their loved ones. Then she added, 
"I do not know which is harder — sending a son, 
or having no son to send." 

Somehow I had never thought of her as a 
mother. She has always been to us just what she 
was at the beginning, a dear friend, a fine and lova- 
ble girl. It comes to me suddenly that she is old 
enough now to have been the mother of a soldier. 
She does not know which is harder, sending a son, 
or having no son to send. 

There are thousands of girls who are sending 
their lovers and who do not know it. 

In after years, when people break their hearts by 
calling them old maids, they will not be able to say, 
"My husband, or my lover, was killed in the war." 

But that is where he is to-day. 

So among those who are giving, in these days of 
generous sacrifice, I place near the front the girls 
who are giving the men who would have loved 
them if they had stayed at home; the girls who 
now will live and die unloved. 

They are among the war's heroines. 



'THE KID HAS GONE TO THE COLORS" 

The little group of old men marched ahead; 
then the boys; then a few of us middle-aged men 
who were there in more or less official capacities. 

We accompanied the boys — the old men in 
front and we middle-aged men in the rear — and 
stayed with them till the train took them away. 

The old men all wore the insignia of the Grand 
Army of the Republic. Any one of them was old 
enough to have been the grandfather of any of the 
soldiers, as we in the rear were old enough to have 
been their fathers. 

"They're just kids," said one Grand Army man 
to another. 

"They're older than we were," said another. 

The American Civil War has often been called 
the "War of Youth," on account of the age of the 
soldiers upon enlistment. An interesting table is 
given in The American Army, Maj. Gen. William 
H. Carter's recent book. Of a total of 2,778,304 
men enlisted in the Union army during the war, he 

41 



42 Blue Stars and Gold 

says that less than one-fourth were over 2 1 years of 
age. The table of ages at enlistment follows : 

Those 10 years and younger 25 

Those 1 1 years and under 38 

Those 12 years and under 225 

Those 13 years and under 300 

Those 14 years and under 1,523 

Those 15 years and under 104,987 

Those 16 years and under 231,051 

Those 17 years and under 844,891 

Those 18 years and under 1,151,438 

Between 18 and 22 years 2,159,798 

Between 22 and 26 years 618,511 

Between 26 and 45 years 46,462 

More than 45 years old 16,071 

The statistics relating to very young boys, Gen- 
eral Carter says, have often been questioned, but, 
he adds, it must be remembered that the enlistment 
of mere children as drummers and fifers formerly 
was authorized in our army. General Carter him- 
self was only 12^ years old when he enlisted as a 
mounted dispatch messenger in 1864. 

Almost all of the men in the last two classes of 
the table were officers, making the general rank 
and file of the army almost all beardless boys when 
they enlisted. 

The War Department uniformly refuses to ex- 



"The Kid Has Gone to the Colors" 43 

press an opinion as to the correctness of tables like 
this. It affirms that there are no reliable statistics 
on which to base such a classification of soldiers by 
age. 

So, even with the authority of General Carter 
standing behind the figures, we accept them with 
some reservation. No one knows just how many 
men of a given age fought in the Civil War. 

But they were boys, a large proportion of them. 

A majority of them, probably, could not vote. 

Young as the boys are who go forth to the pres- 
ent struggle, they are not younger than their grand- 
fathers were when they fought at Shiloh or 
Antietam or Gettysburg. 

It seems impossible that the boy whom we are 
hardly accustomed to seeing in long trousers should 
be carrying a gun in his country's service. 

But he is in the army. 

"The kid has gone to the colors." 



WHY MUST MY BOY GO? 

We all have asked that question in our hearts. 
Whether we admit it or not, that thought has come 
to us. We knew the war had to be won, and that 
the winning of the war meant that there must be 
soldiers, but why must our boys, yours and mine, 
be among them? There were others who could 
so much better be spared for the world's rough 
work! 

There is an old poem of the Civil War which 
I vaguely remember and know not who wrote it, 
which tells of a widow whose only son, barely 
eighteen, had been drafted: 

What, drafted? My boy? My Harry? 

Why, man, 'tis a boy at his books, 
No taller, I'm sure, than your Annie, 

As delicate, too, in his looks! 
Five stalwart sons has my neighbor, 

And never the lot upon one; 
Is this one of Fortune's caprices, 

Or is it God's will that is done? 
44 



Why Must My Boy Go ? 45 

That was part of the bitterness of it, that she 
did not know whether to think it the will of God 
and to submit, or to charge it to the whim of fate 
and resist. 

But supposing it to be the will of God, even 
then submission was not easy: 

O what have I done, a weak woman, 

In what have I meddled with harm, 
Troubling only my God for the sunshine 

And rain on my rough little farm, 
That my plowshares are beaten to swords 

And welded before my eyes — 
That my tears must cleanse a foul nation, 

My lamb be a sacrifice? 



Mothers have cried out in that fashion through 
long generations; and then have given their boys 
with sorrowing pride. 

And you and I felt the protest in our hearts, 
but we have parted with them, and we would not 
have them back till they come back in victory and 
in honor. 

War-brides are celebrating their lonely honey- 
moon, and reflecting on the contrast between what 
they had hoped and what has really occurred. It 
did not seem possible that he could go ! Of course 
there must be soldiers if there was to be a war, 
but it did not seem quite possible that he was to be 



46 Blue Stars and Gold 

one of them! Margaret E. Sangster has caught 
the feeling of the lonely bride : 

Somehow I never thought that you would go, 
Not even when red war swept through the land — 
I somehow thought, because I loved you so, 
That you would stay. I did not understand 
That something stronger than my love could come, 
To draw you, half-reluctant, from my heart ; 
I never thought the call of fife and drum 
Would rend our cloak of happiness apart ! 

And yet, you went. . . And I — I did not weep — 
I smiled, instead, and brushed the tears aside. 
And yet, when night-time comes, I can not sleep 
But silent lie, while longing fights with pride — 
You are my man, the foe you fight my foe, 
And yet — / never thought that you would go! 

SOMEHOW 

by Margaret E. Sangster. 

Let me tell you something which perhaps you do 
not know. There is a love that is love of posses- 
sion, and there is a nobler love that loves truly 
enough to include the love of renunciation. This 
war is going to teach America and all her sons and 
all her daughters that nobler love. The time has 
come when you have your opportunity to leaiv. 
your share of it. 



Mothers and Wives 
By Edgar A. Guest 

Mothers and wives, 'tis the call to arms 

That the bugler yonder prepares to sound ; 
We stand on the brink of war's alarms 

And your men may lie on a bloodstained ground. 
The drums may play and the flags may fly, 

And our boys may don the brown and blue, 
And the call that summons brave men to die 

Is the call for glorious women, too. 

Mothers and wives, if the summons comes, 

You, as ever since war has been, 
Must hear with courage the rolling drums 

And dry your tears when the flags are seen. 
For never has hero fought and died 

Who has braver been than the mother, who 
Buckled his saber at his side, 

And sent him forward to dare and do. 

Mothers and wives, should the call ring out, 

It is you must answer your country's cry ; 
You must furnish brave hearts and stout 

For the firing line where the heroes die. 
And never a corpse on the field of strife 

Should be honored more in his country's sight 
Than the noble mother or noble wife 

Who sent him forth in the cause of right. 
47 



48 Blue Stars and Gold 

Mothers and wives, 'tis the call for men 

To give their strength and to give their lives; 
But well we know, such a summons then 

Is the call for mothers and loyal wives. 
For you must give us the strength we need, 

You must give us the boys in blue, 
For never a boy or a man shall bleed 

But a mother or wife shall suffer, too. 



OUR BOYS AT SEA 

I was born inland, yet my heart has ever been 
upon the ocean. When I have sailed it, it has come 
to me as my own. And now that my sons go forth 
to war, I find them preferring the sea. I do not 
wonder. This war is to make many changes. 
Among the rest, it will give us a new relation to 
the sea. 

Admiral Mahan, an American naval comman- 
der, changed the destiny of the world by writing 
a few years ago his great book on the sea power 
of nations. 

Europe read that book, and at once understood 
its meaning. America read it, and was not greatly 
concerned at the time; but we know its meaning 
now. 

We shall never again surrender our right to the 
sea, nor allow it to be possible for any man to say 
that he had sailed around the world and had not 
seen the American flag on a single ocean-going 
vessel. 

4$ 



50 Blue Stars and Gold 

What a miracle this war has wrought with our 
ships ! 

I was in New York a few days ago, and saw the 
"Leviathan" — once the "Vaterland," and the 
greatest ship afloat — loaded with soldiers for 
France. 

But she did not look like the "Vaterland." 

She was camouflaged. 

She was painted after a cubist fashion in great 
patches of blue and white and neutral color so that 
at a distance she did not look like a ship. And so 
were the other vessels on which we are sending 
men across. 

The face of Helen, it was said "launched a thou- 
sand ships, and burned the topless towers of 
Ilium." 

But who shall sing the Iliad of this present cru- 
sade? 

The war came to us and found us unprepared — 
criminally unprepared some men say, but I am not 
sure of that. 

And here we are, a twelvemonth later, with 
almost two millions of our men in France, and 
other millions soon to go ! 

An American college president, Dr. Carl G. 
Doney, serving the Y. M. C. A. in France, stood 
on the dock in a French port where American sol- 
diers were unloading by the tens of thousands. 

With patriotic pride he describes the inspiring 



Our Boys at Sea 51 

spectacle that was unfolded to him as our trans- 
ports deposited their precious cargo on French 
shores. 

It was a harbor and city which the conservative 
French rated as having a capacity to receive and 
care for twenty thousand troops a month, a quarter 
of a million a year. Yet America touched it and in 
a single day more than forty thousand soldiers were 
landed and placed in comfortable quarters, with 
injury to none. I asked the American in command 
what the capacity of the port really was and he re- 
plied that it had no limit, that all who came would 
be landed and cared for as rapidly as ships could 
steam into the bay. 

On this great day the air was electric. Boats in 
the roadstead hoisted anchor and moved to the side 
of the channel or to the inner harbor. A tug 
plowed a drunken course before the harbor en- 
trance, trailing a sausage balloon which swung a 
thousand feet above it. A dirigible buzzed from its 
hangar and glided like a monster chrysalis toward 
the open sea. 

I stood enraptured, mystified, wondering what 
plan or purpose lay behind, wondering whose was 
the mind directing all this movement. Even as I 
mused a cloud of smoke stained the sky between the 
headlands of the narrow entrance to the harbor. 
The cloud increased until through my glasses I 
made out the outlines of a fleet. It steered straight 
on, but in half an hour I marked the zigzag dashes 



52 Blue Stars and Gold 

of the nimble destroyers as they darted around the 
mighty vessels they protected. 

Then I understood : America was soon to add yet 
another evidence that her just demand for a safe 
world to live in is to be pursued until it is attained. 
I saw the ships come in, each like a king bearing a 
royal gift, each humbly proud to have a part in that 
thing which is to make the world anew. I saw the 
ships come in, each swinging to its berth like a 
well-drilled soldier, each dropping anchor and haw- 
ser in the spot directed by the admiral. 

The dirigible buzzed back to its bed. The tug 
and its great eye in the sky plied back and forth 
before the harbor's mouth. The destroyers, like 
tired hounds, found their place of rest behind the 
mole. No whistles blew, no bells sounded, no 
flags were hoisted to bid welcome to the priceless 
argosy of souls from overseas. But they were wel- 
come ! O, they were welcome ! A flash went un- 
der the seas, a message reached Paris and London 
and Rome, the word touched hamlet and city and 
farm, and a world in the throes of a new birth 
thanked God and was encouraged. 

I saw the surging masses on the ships, heard the 
sound of voices like the noise of falling waters, 
caught the marching song of farewell to America 
and greeting to France. Chains rattled, the gang- 
way descended and khaki-colored streams of life 
poured itself upon the soil of France. Every ship 
yielded its precious cargo, either directly upon the 
quay or into the waiting barges, and as the sons of 



Our Boys at Sea 53 

the great republic felt the firm touch of the old 
world beneath their feet, they cheered, shouted, 
sang, making varied and marvelous sounds of joy. 

I saw the boys march by. They were boys from 
my own sweet home-land and a great pride moved 
me to tears. I was proud of my country, proud 
of those valiant sons, infinitely proud of the cause 
which made them proud to do the thing that they 
were doing. 

I saw the French folk crowd the parapet to see 
my country-men — women and children and a few 
old men. Tears which they hid when their own 
sons died flowed unrebuked from thankful eyes. I 
do not know why they did so, but under the im- 
pulse many joined hands and in a silence that was 
reverent they beheld the invasion of their land by 
armed men of whom they had no fear, by fighting 
men whose word they trusted as they would the 
promises of Holy Writ. 

That was the way it looked to an American, 
standing there and seeing the first of the American 
troops disembark. 

And how did it seem to the French? It thrilled 
them to hear Pershing at the tomb of our noble 
French friend, — u La Fayette, we are here I" It 
thrilled the people of France who had watched for 
us with sad eyes. 

I have read somewhere that as the stars and 
stripes passed down the street on the arrival of our 



54 Blue Stars and Gold 

boys in France, little children kneeled in the street 
and offered prayer at the sight. 

(Why so patient, standing there, 
Edouard, and small Pierre, 
Georges, Yvette, and Marie-Claire?) 

"When the troops come marching by," 

(Quoth the small Pierre) 
"Mother, wilt thou lift me high, 
That we may see them, thou and I?" 

"Mother, are they fair to see?" 

(A busy tongue — Pierre) 
"Have they little boys like me, 
Left at home across the sea?" 

(Alas! Alas! Pierre.) 

"Mother, we have waited long;" 

(Long indeed, Pierre!) 
"The sun has grown so hot and strong — 
Surely none has done them wrong?" 

(God forbid! Pierre.) 

"Mother, who did send them here?" 
(The gift of GOD, Pierre.) 

"But then there is no need of fear, 

And on thy cheek I see a tear." 

(The tears of hope, Pierre.) 



Our Boys at Sea 55 

Down the boulevard a cry — 

A bugle note is flung on high — 

The Stars and Stripes are passing by! 

"The gift of GOD," quoth small Pierre; 
His hat on breast, his curls all bare, 
He knelt upon the pavement there. 

(Five young children kneeling there — 
Georges, Yvette, and Marie-Claire, 
Edouard and small Pierre.) 

Fairest flag of Liberty, 
Carrying hope across the sea — 
A little child has hallowed thee, 
And made of thee a prayer! 

IN THE MIDST OF THEM 

by Margaret Bell Merrill 

They will receive honor those boys of ours in 
France, and they will deserve it. But let us not 
forget to honor those who take them thither in 
the transports, and those in the destroyers who 
guard them, and those who sweep the sea of its 
murderous mines, facing the maximum of peril 
with the minimum of glory. 

Our boys at sea are doing more than conquer 
the murderous submarine. They are making safe 
for future generations the highways of the world. 
Moreover, they are winning back for America her 



56 Blue Stars and Gold 

proud heritage of mastery of the waves. Well may 
we pray for our boys : 

From rock and tempest, fire and foe, 
Protect them wheresoe'er they go. 

They are carrying the flag at the masthead and 
over the stern of vessels from which it will never 
be hauled down. We are conquering the sea again 
for America and humanity. 



The Call of the Sea 
By John Jerome Rooney 

We shall go down to the sea in ships, 

We shall retake the salt waves' wage; 
After the moil of the sleepless shops, 

We shall reclaim our heritage. 
Long, too long, have our eyes been set 

On the restless marts and the toil of the fields; 
Long, too long, have our hearts forgot 

The harvest the wild fume yields. 
Our viking fathers dared the deeps 

Where the fabled monsters lay in wait — 
Followed the star to the dim world's verge 

And charted the utmost strait. 

Over the pathless waves they fared, 

Down thro' the fierce Barbados' wrack; 
Up where the frozen mountains tower 

And bar the sailor's track. 
They trusted well their ships of oak 

To match the hurricane's toss and reel — 
Hearts of oak more stout than their ships. 

And we trust our hearts of steel ! 
57 



58 Blue Stars and Gold 

Our ocean mother we run to greet — 
Return again to her wide, sweet arms, 

To cradle our heads on her heaving breast 
And cure our fever harms. 

For it is not good to forget the sea, 

Mother of strong, undaunted men, 
Mother of bounty, mother of health, 

We shall come back again ! 
We shall go down to the sea in ships, 

We shall retake the salt waves' wage; 
After the moil of the shops and fields 

We shall reclaim our heritage. 
The starry flag that lit the deeps, 

When the greyhound clipper roamed the world, 
Shall light again the Seven Seas 

And never shall be furl'd ! 



THE MAN WHO HAD LOST A SON 

My friend of many years came back on business 
to the city where he had formerly lived, and re- 
mained for several days. 

He did not call on me. He never has failed 
before. 

Even when his visits were shorter and his busi- 
ness more urgent than I suppose to have been the 
case this time, he has always come to see me, or if 
that was impossible, he has telephoned. 

This time he did neither. 

Nor did he call on any of his other old friends. 

I know the reason. He is heart-broken. 

He has lost a son in the war. 

I have known the young man since he was a 
prattling little lad. He was a boy of promise, and 
his father had great pride in him. He has gone ; he 
is lost. His father dared not face his friends and 
answer their questions about his family. 

He came to the city, did his business, kept in his 
hotel when he was not otherwise engaged, and left 
on a night train. 

59 



60 Blue Stars and Gold 

He has lost his boy in the war. 

The young man is not dead. 

He is alive in South America. 

He escaped into Mexico, was smuggled aboard 
a coasting steamer, and is alive and well in South 
America. He ran away to escape the draft. 

He lives to-day, a man without a country. 

And his father has lost his son. 

Other fathers wear little rectangular pins with 
blue stars displayed on them. They love their sons 
as this man loves his son, and they miss their sons 
as he misses his. Their blue stars may turn to 
gold. Their boys may be shot on the battlefield or 
be lost at sea. My friend's son is safe, and the 
father is shamed. 

When the war is over, other men will have heads 
whitened with anxiety and perhaps with sorrow, 
but they will hold them high in holy pride. But 
my friend will have no share in their pride and 
his sorrow will be incurable. 

Your son has gone to the colors? He is serv- 
ing his country "over there"? You have not lost 
him. You cannot lose him. If he dies, he will be- 
long to you, and to the immortality of good. 

But my friend with his living son safe in South 
America will have a bitter grief which has nothing 
in common with yours. 

You have not lost your son. 

Kipling has a poem entitled "The Mary Glos- 



The Man Who Had Lost a Son 61 

ter" which tells of that saddest of all sorrows, the 
sorrow of a father who had lost a son, and lost 
him hopelessly. 

Sir Anthony Gloster was dying. He had begun 
life as a common sailor, and had risen till he was 
a millionaire, the owner of thirty-eight merchant 
ships, and a worthless son. 

Sir Anthony wanted to be buried in his own 
way. He had a marble tomb, a fine family vault, 
but what was a family vault to a man who had no 
family, or worse than none? He wanted to be 
buried at sea beside his wife; and he feared that 
if he left it to his son, it would not be done. So he 
made a plan by which it was certain that his wishes 
were to be carried out. He made it to his son's 
interest to do as he was told. There were to be 
$25,000 for him if he did it, over and above what 
the will provided. 

He was to take one of his father's ships, the 
"Mary Gloster," named for his mother, Sir An- 
thony's dead wife, and sail her to the very spot 
where Mary Gloster herself was buried, and there 
sink her. The old chief engineer McAndrews was 
in the secret, and would help carry out the plan : 

He'll take the Mary in ballast — you'll find her a lively 

ship; 
And you'll take Sir Anthony Gloster, that goes on 'is 

wedding trip, 



62 Blue Stars and Gold 

Lashed in our old deck-cabin, with all three portholes wide, 

The kick o' the screw beneath him, and the round blue 
seas outside! 

He made himself and a million, but this world is a fleet- 
in' show, 

And he'll go to the wife of 'is bosom, the same as he 
ought to go. 

It was to be an extravagant coffin, a perfectly 
good ship; but that was the ship that his dead wife 
helped to earn, the ship that was named for her, 
the ship on which she died. That was the ship that 
was to be sunk where her body was slid off the 
grating in far-off Macassar Strait. 

Sir Anthony knew that his son Dick would chafe 
under the necessity of carrying out his father's 
wishes, but that he would do it for the cash : 

"And Mac'll pay you the money, as soon as the bubbles 
break." 

Sir Anthony had pictured it all in his mind. 
McAndrews would be sure of the place, near the 
heel of the Little Paternoster Islands, at Longi- 
tude 118 East and Latitude just 3 South. He 
would slow up, and stop the engines, and draw the 
fires, and open the bilge-cocks: 

Down by the head an' sinkin', her fires are drawn and 

cold, 
And the water's splashin' hollow on the skin of the empty 

hold— 



The Man Who Had Lost a Son 63 

Churning and choking and chuckling, quiet and scummy 

and dark — 
Full to her lower hatches, and rising steady — Hark! 
That was her after bulkhead! She's flooded from stem 

to stern! 
Never seen death yet, Dickie? Well, now is your time 

to learn! 

Sir Anthony Gloster was no saint, as the poem 
shows plainly, but he was a man. And now the 
sting of death to him was that his son was worthless. 

The things I knew was proper, you wouldn't thank 

me to give ; 
And the things I knew was rotten you said was the way 

to live. 

For my son 'e was never a credit ; he muddled with books 
and art; 

And 'e lived on Sir Anthony's money, and 'e broke Sir An- 
thony's heart. 

There isn't even a grandchild, and the Gloster family's 
done — 

The only one you left me, O mother, the only one ! 

Harrer and Trinity College, me slavin' early and late, 

An' he thinks I'm dying crazy, and you're in Macassar 
Strait! 

It is men like this who have really lost their sons. 
You and I, whose boys have lived clean and worthy 
lives, and now are risking them for the service of 
God and humanity — we have not lost them. 

And whatever happens, we shall not lose them. 



THE STARS IN OUR FLAG 

The use of flags is very ancient. In the Song 
of Solomon we find the question, "Who is she that 
cometh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, 
clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with ban- 
ners?" In the splendid wars of the Maccabees, 
the Hebrews who were fighting for liberty and 
righteousness carried banners bearing the initial 
letters of the words, "Who is like unto Thee, O 
Jehovah, among the gods?" 

Down through the ages of warfare the flag has 
been a picturesque feature of the battle. 

It seemed, however, as if this might not have 
continued indefinitely. Thirty years ago an Eng- 
lishman, writing in the Cornhill Magazine, spoke 
of the disappearance of the flag from the battle- 
field: 

Nowadays we have no flag to speak of in any 
other than the decorative shape. If to-morrow we 
were to fight with France, we doubt if throughout 
the whole campaign one solitary union would be 
visible. Soon there will be no more colors hanging in 
64 



The Stars in Our Flag 65 

cathedral aisles, for, nowadays, they are never ven- 
tured near the fight, are indeed stored at home long 
before the fighting begins, and war, which has so 
fast been losing its pomp and pageantry, loses in its 
colors one feature the more. During the whole of 
the fighting in the Sudan, the only touch of bunt- 
ing visible was the small red flag carried by a mili- 
tary policeman after the general, to let the staff 
know his whereabouts. 

The flag has largely disappeared from the bat- 
tlefield, but it would not be safe to infer that it has 
no future in fighting. There is little danger that 
Americans will cease to carry their flag with all 
their armies. It will go wherever the American 
army and navy go, and it will go victoriously. 

Splendid and strong as the call of the mountain, 

Brilliant and fresh as the song of the sea; 
High on the ramparts of morning she's floating, 

Emblem of Liberty! Glorious! Free! 
Over broad fields of grain she is flying, 

Snowy-starred peaks and the grand canon's roar; 
Over the languorous palm and the pine tree, 

Flag of the Nation! Long, long, may she soar! 

Dazzling in color, rare vision of beauty, 

Matchless her bars as the high crimsoned East, 

Purest the field of her blue whence her starlings 
Sing to the breeze of the rights of the least! 



66 Blue Stars and Gold 

Wonderful markings of ivory unsullied 
Echo triumphantly Man stands for Man, 

Throughout the breadth of our entire dominion! 
Honor alone is the test of the Man! 

Radiant symbol of Love universal, 

Down through the ages with majesty wave! 
Bearing aloft on thy beautiful pinions 

Ideals undimmed to the souls of the brave! 
Torch to the minds of the men of the Nation! 

Lamp to the hearts of the mothers of men! 
Wave! That the vision of Justice may never 

Fade from the vision of women and men! 

Born of much travail, behold her resplendent! 

Kissing the breeze where the Cavalier trod ; 
Treading the winds where the bold Dutchman traded, 

And the stanch Puritan bent but to God. 
Gracefully waving over Huguenot, Quaker, 

Negro and Peasant and Indian brave; 
Over the land of the Humane! The Mighty! 

America's Beauty! Long, long may she wave! 

THE FLAG 

by Elaine Darling. 

We do not know certainly who first proposed 
the use of the star in our flag. It was a new idea 
in heraldry. It is thought to have been suggested 
by the stars on the Washington coat of arms, but 
this is uncertain. 

There were stars on the model which George 



The Stars in Our Flag 67 

Washington took to Betsy Ross in 1776. She 
knew how to cut out a five-pointed star with a 
single cut of the shears, which is one reason why 
our flag has stars of five points instead of six. 

The first official flag displayed over Washing- 
ton's headquarters on January 1, 1776, had stripes 
but no stars. This little union jack had the tradi- 
tional crosses of St. George and St. Andrew, and 
was allowed to hold its place for some weeks or 
months. But by the time George Washington and 
Betsy Ross had their memorable meeting, there 
was no talk of a cross in the field of blue; Betsy 
was instructed to cut out thirteen of her five- 
pointed stars. 

Those are noble lines of Joseph Rodman Drake : 

When Freedom from her mountain height 

Unfurled her banner to the air, 
She tore the azure robe of night, 

And set the stars of glory there ! 

The star was a new thing in a flag. But how 
wonderfully appropriate ! What a constellation 
that little group of thirteen stars made when it 
first sought fellowship with the stars above and the 
nations of the earth ! And how far more glorious 
now, when the number is more than trebled ! 

In the national banner every star represents a 
sovereign State. 

But in the service flag, every star is a Son. 



Our Service Flag 

Arthur M. Corwin 

With field of white, with stars of blue, 
With binding band of ruddy hue, 
Fair emblem of a nation's pride, 
"Old Glory's" symbols sanctified, 
Our loyalty that shall not lag 
We pledge to thee, our Service Flag. 

From windows of the rich and poor, 
The spirit streaming warm and pure, 
The spirit of great Washington, 
Speaks through a thousand stars or one 
Of loyalty that shall not lag, 
Our pledge to thee, oh, Service Flag. 

Enmeshed within thy field of white, 
The righteous cause for which we fight, 

Of justice, honor, liberty 

The whole world round o'er land and sea; 
The loyalty that shall not lag 
We pledge to thee, our Service Flag. 
68 



Our Service Flag 69 

The stars! The blue of cloudless skies, 
The blue of love, of sacrifice, 

Of love for country, home and friend, 

That soldier-sailor boys defend 
With loyalty that shall not lag, 
The "true blues" of our Service Flag. 

Red runs the border of thy scroll, 

The flaming passion of the soul, 

The will, the courage and the might 
Of those who live and die for right, 

The loyalty that shall not lag 

To back thy boys, oh, Service Flag. 



NEW STARS 

Now and then new stars appear in the heavens. 
It is not known how they occur, but the prevalent 
theory is that they rise out of the collision of 
two solar systems. Out of the crash a new 
solar system springs into being. Such a star 
appeared early in June, 191 8, in the eastern sky 
and, if Americans are interested in the fact, it was 
in the constellation of the Eagle. It attained a 
brilliance equal to that of the planet Jupiter, but 
it faded rapidly, and the astronomers are watching 
its gradual disappearance. Keppler discovered 
such a star in 1604, and the most carefully studied 
of these new stars was Nova Persei, which ap- 
peared in 1901. 

The thing which astronomers are sure about is 
that these new stars occur at such distance from us 
that what we see of their sudden flare-up really 
occurred a hundred, or two hundred, or ten hun- 
dred years ago, and it has taken all that time for 
the light to reach us. 

70 



New Stars 71 

Some people think that the Star of Bethlehem 
was a Nova of this character, and that its lighting 
up of the sky in the year when Jesus was born, was 
the birth of a new solar system somewhere in the 
sky, as it was of new hope in our own world. 

We do not know very much about that. 

But this present war has given birth to a new 
star, the star of the Service Flag. That is the 
most brilliant of the Novae. 

Every one wants to know about the status of the 
service flag. 

Is it official? 

Has any one decided just who may display it, 
and for whom ? 

Should the star of a dead soldier be black or 
gold? 

What should be the use of the star for wounded 
and invalid soldiers? 

The service flag is not official. Official adop- 
tion of such an emblem has been discussed in Con- 
gress, but no action has ever been taken. The 
Adjutant General of the United States Army, how- 
ever, has indorsed as correct a memorandum by 
Lieut. Col. Nathan William MacChesney, Judge 
Advocate, N. A., Central Department, which gives 
the status, so to speak, of the service flag and tells 
its proper use. It has therefore, to quote Lieut. 
Col. MacChesney, a "semi-official place. It was 
Lieut. Col. MacChesney who recommended the 



72 Blue Stars and Gold 

use of gold and silver stars on the flag. He says: 

It has been decided that, on these flags, a blue 
star shall represent those in the military or naval 
service of the United States, a silver star those 
wounded or invalided home from overseas, with a 
gold star superimposed for those who die as the re- 
sult of such wounds or disease, and a gold star 
alone for those killed in action. 

A short time ago Lieut. Col. MacChesney re- 
ceived a letter suggesting that a service flag pin 
with a gold star for a member of one's family 
killed in action be worn in lieu of mourning. He 
replied: 

Considerable thought has been given to this mat- 
ter. In England the wearing of mourning has been 
discouraged on the ground that it has a depressing 
effect, though it is generally seen on the Continent. 
It has been finally decided, after conference with 
those interested in the subject, to have those who 
have been killed in action represented on the serv- 
ice flag with a gold star, and to use a silver star 
to represent those who have been wounded or in- 
valided home, superimposing a gold star in the 
event of death resulting from such wound or dis- 
ability. Your suggestion, therefore, is in accord- 
ance with the above and would seem to be an ap- 
propriate one. 

When the recommendation of a gold star was 
made for men killed in action and of a silver star 



New Stars 73 

for men wounded, the question of those disabled 
by disease remained to be settled. Early in May 
Colonel MacChesney was asked whether a man 
who had been discharged from the service because 
of heart trouble brought on by the intensive train- 
ing of the military camp was entitled to be repre- 
sented in the service flag by a silver star. He re- 
plied: 

There has been some talk also of recognizing with 
a silver star those who have been invalided home, 
as well as those wounded. This, however, has 
not been definitely determined as yet. The Gov- 
ernment provides a special chevron for those who 
have been wounded in action, but does not provide 
any such special distinction for those who become 
unfit because of disease. Some feel that the silver 
star on the flag should be limited to cases entitled 
to official recognition by the Government through 
the wound chevron. Others feel that those who 
have been invalided home, if they are to be repre- 
sented by the silver star, should at least have un- 
dergone some of the hazards of war, in addition to 
the mere training at home. It would seem, there- 
fore, that until a further ruling is made on the 
subject the particular case inquired about should 
not be represented by a silver star, but that, if per- 
sons who are invalided home are to be represented, 
they should only be those who are invalided home 
from overseas or from wounds. 



74 Blue Stars and Gold 

The silver star for men invalided home from 
overseas, as well as those actually wounded, has 
now been generally recognized. 

Lieut. Col. MacChesney's first memorandum on 
the use of service flags was published in The Offi- 
cial Bulletin, Jan. 21. After stating that the flag 
was authorized and its use encouraged, though 
not officially adopted, the memorandum continued: 

The idea of the service flag is that there shall be 
a star to represent each person from the family, 
place of business, club or other entity, serving with 
the colors. There recently has been some indica- 
tion that this is being abused. Where the service 
flag is hung in the window of a home it should rep- 
resent only members of the family from such im- 
mediate household, and not employes, domestic or 
otherwise. Where it is hung from a place of busi- 
ness it should represent employes going from such 
place of business, and where presumably, some con- 
tinuous relation exists and there is an expectation 
of return to the employment. . . . 

In the case of a flag flown by a household, repre- 
sentation by a star of a husband, son, father or 
brother may properly be allowed even though such 
person did not actually leave from that household 
directly to go into the service, but in case of any 
more distant relatives, they should actually be mem- 
bers of the household where the flag is displayed 
and should have left for the service directly from 
such household. 



IS MY BOY A MURDERER? 

You may resent this question, but it is one that 
you have asked yourself, and so I am going to 
answer it. 

A people nurtured through successive genera- 
tions in the ideals, and deeply immersed in the 
arts and industries, of peace, finding itself in the 
midst of a war that taxes all its resources and 
monopolizes its interests, may go unthinkingly into 
the conflict, shouting such battle cries as have been 
taught to it, and asking no questions of right or 
wrong. But that is not the way America has been 
taught. 

A nation such as this, founded on the right and 
duty of the people to think, must reckon at every 
step with the people's conscience. 

To you and me the supreme question is a moral 
one. It is not even the question whether these 
boys of ours are coming back, though God knows 
we ask that question, too. The supreme question 
for us, as it affects our homes, is the influence of 

75 



76 Blue Stars and Gold 

this war upon the moral character of those who 
are dearer to us than life. 

Of its relation to their chastity and sobriety, I 
speak elsewhere. It is good to know that our 
Government is concerned with this problem. A 
few days ago I heard the Secretary of the Navy 
say, "This Government believes that men who are 
to shoot straight must live straight; and we count 
it one of our first duties to protect the boys of our 
army and our navy from demoralizing influences." 

They are as well protected as our Government 
knows how to protect them. 

But this is not what I mean just now. 

I am not thinking about the temptations incident 
to camp life. 

I am thinking of the influence of war itself on 
the moral character of our American boys. 

They were nurtured amid the ideals of peace. 
Suddenly as if they had gone to sleep on earth and 
wakened in hell, they are placed where it is their 
daily duty to think of killing men. How can this 
make them other than murderers at heart? 

I have visited these boys in their camps, and to 
me it has been an intolerable thought that these 
boys should go forth with only the ideals of hate 
and bloodshed. I have wished to assure myself 
that they were something else than shedders of 
blood. 

It was not the motive of murder that carried 



Is My Boy a Murderer ? 77 

us into the war. But will the war make murderers 
out of us all? 

If it makes murderers out of our boys, it will 
make murderers of us all. That is sure. 

If it is wicked to point a gun toward the German 
trenches and pull the trigger, it is just as wrong 
to buy a Liberty Bond. 

Whatever the moral aspect of the war, it is not 
confined to our boys. We are accessories before 
the fact and after. 

The moral responsibility is not theirs alone. 

There come to men and nations, and that by 
divine appointment, crises in which it becomes nec- 
essary to choose among courses of conduct no one 
of which is in itself desirable. Of such choices 
there is always one that ought to be made, and 
but one; and because it ought to be made, that 
course in these circumstances is right. Not to 
choose that course is sin, and to choose it is meri- 
torious. However undesirable that course might 
be in itself, chosen in its relation to other possible 
courses of conduct it is right, and the only right 
course. 

The time came to America when it had to choose 
whether to go to war, which it did not desire to do, 
and which selfishly speaking it had good reason 
not to do, or whether it should become by its 
inertia, its love of wealth, and its moral detach- 
ment from the rest of the world in the day of its 



78 Blue Stars and Gold 

desolation, an accessory in the perpetration of 
shameful wrongs that threatened the very founda- 
tions of our civilization. 

Confronted by that alternative, America made 
her choice. Not lightly or boastfully, not in the 
heat of passion, but with a terrible deliberation, 
with an awe-inspiring calmness of soul, America 
decided to cast herself into the hands of God 
rather than into the hands of men, and to suffer 
affliction with the bleeding world rather than enjoy 
the profits of the great refusal. 

There are those to whom this course appeals 
only as a choice of evils; but a sound ethical phil- 
osophy cannot rest there. If it was our duty to 
do it, then the thing which it was our duty to do 
was not evil. It is never evil to do one's duty. If 
the thing ought to be done, then not to do it is a 
sin, and to do it is not only not sin, but is meri- 
torious. More than that, it is imperative duty. To 
hold to anything short of this is to confess one's 
inability to think through a problem of practical 
conduct to a moral solution. 

I dwell on this because it goes to the very core 
of the question of right and wrong in the course 
we have chosen. We cannot rest till we have as- 
sured ourselves that we are acting in accordance 
with sound ethical principles. We must fight with 
our consciences speaking their word of approval, 
or we cannot fight at all. If we are sure we are 



Is My Boy a Murderer f 79 

right, then, and not otherwise, we can go straight 
forward. For myself, I have tried to think this 
matter through, as sanely and calmly as I knew 
how. Hating war as I do, I believe that in the 
situation that confronted us in April, 19 17, we 
had no moral right not to go to war. I believe, 
furthermore, that having gone to war when we 
did, and as we did, we have an imperative duty 
now to press the war to a completely successful 
issue. 

The laws of the land in which we live hold every 
man responsible, not only for the acts which he 
performs, but for those which he might prevent 
and does not. Every man in a republic is a moral 
guardian of the public peace. If a man sees a 
murder or a theft or an arson, and sees it in time 
to have prevented it, and does not do so, the law 
says that that man is an accessory before the fact. 

In the family of nations every nation is re- 
sponsible for the use it makes or fails to make of 
its power. The principle is precisely that which 
Jesus set forth in the matter of the healing of the 
man on the Sabbath, namely, that to fail to do good 
when good needs to be done and there is power 
to do it, is to do evil, and that to neglect to save 
life is to destroy it. Not even the Sabbath was too 
sacred for the saving of life. 

America is responsible, not only for the good 
she may do, but for the evil she may prevent. 



80 Blue Stars and Gold 

Edgar A. Guest has well interpreted this sense 
of responsibility which America feels in the pre- 
vention of wrong: 

This is the thing we fight: 
A cry of terror in the night; 
A ship on work of mercy bent — 

A carrier of the sick and maimed — 
Beneath the cruel waters sent, 

And those that did it, unashamed. 

A woman who had tried to fill 

A mother's place; had nursed the ill 

And soothed the troubled brows of pain 

And earned the dying's grateful prayers, 
Before a wall by soldiers slain! 

And such a poor pretext was theirs! 



All this we fight — that some day when 
Good sense shall come again to men, 
Our children's children may not read 

This age's history thus defamed 
And find we served a selfish creed 

And ever be of us ashamed! 



WHY WE FIGHT 

by Edgar A. Guest. 



If I see a murderer, armed and mad with liquor, 
trying to kill his wife, the law does not say to me 
that it is my duty to stop him if I can do it without 



Is My Boy a Murderer 1 81 

hurting him. Under such conditions it is my duty 
to stop his effort to murder his wife, even if I hurt 
him very badly — even if I endanger my own life. 
The law says that if I stand by and let him murder 
his wife for fear I might hurt him, I am partly 
guilty of the murder he commits. 

The laws of God and man hold me responsible 
for the good that I am able to do and the evil which 
I am able to prevent. 

As between the drunken murderer and his victim, 
the law will not give ear to my plea of neutrality. 

America was at that point where, not to prevent 
murder and atrocity, was to assume a share of the 
guilt of it. 

And if it was America's duty to stop that 
iniquity, then it was your boy's duty and my boy's 
duty to risk life and limb in the effort to stop it. 

And it is your duty and mine to uphold the effort 
of America and her allies with our strong sympa- 
thies and our prayers and to believe that we are in 
the right. 

No ; your boy is not a murderer. He is a knight 
errant, set out on a holy adventure for the sake of 
righteousness and true chivalry. God send him 
good success 1 



WILL MY BOY RETURN TO ME? 

I wish I could tell you, dear friend, whether 
your boy who has gone to serve his country will 
return to you alive and well. I earnestly hope so. 
But if you knew and he knew that he was to return 
safely, it would materially reduce the heroism of 
the sacrifice. It is the element of uncertainty that 
makes the venture heroic. 

But there are some words of comfort to be said, 
among them this, that the big guns are lifesavers, 
and that war with all its desolation steadily grows 
safer. Captain Johnson, in his book, "Arms and 
the Race," which is based on statistics prior to the 
present war, shows that fighting is less dangerous 
as weapons grow more powerful and precise. The 
loss per thousand men per fighting hour has stead- 
ily diminished since the invention of gunpowder 
and the improved methods of using it. If two men 
are armed with knives, and set to fight to a de- 
cision, it is likely that one will be dead and the other 
badly wounded in less than i\ve minutes. But if 

82 



Will My Boy Return to Me? 83 

those two men are armed with accurate rifles and 
placed in trenches facing each other, they may 
shoot at each other all winter and both be alive in 
the spring. 

But the losses in this present war, are they not 
more appalling than in any previous war? Yes, 
because more men are actively engaged. In a re- 
cent article in Leslie's, Mr. Conklin Mann said: 

The vast number of men under arms in Europe 
and the mighty proportions of the military opera- 
tions are responsible for a widespread belief that the 
battle casualties of the war are far greater than 
those of any other war. The total number killed 
unquestionably staggers the imagination and far 
surpasses the number in previous wars, but the best 
available information points to a lower proportion- 
ate death rate than in any previous struggle. Far 
fewer English, French and Russian soldiers, in pro- 
portion to the number under arms, are falling than 
fell when Napoleon turned Europe into a camp over 
a hundred years ago. So, too, are the proportionate 
losses smaller than when the North and South 
fought it out for four bitter years. It is not con- 
ceivable that America's losses in Europe will come 
anywhere near equaling those in the War Between 
the States. 

M. Andre Tardieu, French High Commissioner 
to the United States, recently showed that the 
armies of to-day are suffering smaller losses in pro- 



84 Blue Stars and Gold 

portion to their size than the armies of other wars, 
and among the armies of the Allies the losses are 
steadily decreasing. 

He gave these figures concerning the French 
army: 

PER CENT OF CASUALTIES IN PROPORTION TO 
MOBILIZED STRENGTH 

Battles of Charleroi and of the Marne 5.41 

First 6 months of 1915 2.39 

Second 6 months of 19 15 1.68 

First 6 months of 1 9 1 6 1 .47 

Second 6 months of 19 16 1.28 

Mr. Roger Babson, the statistician, said recently 
after an exhaustive investigation of the statistics of 
the first three years of the war : 

Fourteen men out of every fifteen have been safe 
so far. Under present conditions, where man 
power is being saved, not more than one in thirty 
is killed. Only one man in five hundred loses a 
limb, a chance no greater than in hazardous con- 
ditions at home. 

If we are to give the devil his due, this may be 
said in justice to war — that some of the young men 
who die in battle would have died at home. This 
proportion must in fairness be deducted from the 
gross losses of war. Mr. Luther B. Little, presi- 



Will My Boy Eeturn to Me? 85 

dent of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Com- 
pany, says : 

The war registration showed that there are in 
round numbers 10,000,000 men between the ages 
of 21 and 31 in the United States, and the average 
death rate among these in time of peace is 8 per 
1,000. It sounds like a calamity to say that among 
the young men of America between 21 and 31, 
80,000 will die in a year. It is a terrible thing, but 
it is the condition that prevails in time of peace. 

If the entire 10,000,000 men who are regis- 
tered went to the war, the list of deaths during the 
first year would be sickening when decorated with 
headlines in the newspapers. The actuaries' table 
shows that 80,000 of them would drop out one by 
one if they remained at home. 

"War is hell" in its casualties, but less than four 
in a hundred, on the average, die for their country. 
Mr. Walter R. Malone, president of the Postal 
Life Insurance Company, says : 

American soldiers go to the battle-front under the 
most advantageous circumstances. They are being 
taught all that the Allies have learned in their years 
of war, and they are equipped with the latest 
weapons and devices for offensive and defensive 
fighting. If preparation counts, casualties will fall 
even lower than the figures for the French army. 



86 Blue Stars and Gold 

In an article published in the Economic World, 
of August 4, 19 1 7, Miles M. Dawson gives as the 
total death rate among the 2,000,000 men insured 
by the London Prudential who have been in the 
present war, as 30 per 1,000, per annum. And 
he estimates that the ordinary death rate among 
those policyholders in time of peace was at least 
10 per 1,000, per annum. 

There is, therefore, very much more than an 
even chance that your boy will come back to you. 
God send him back well and clean and victorious. 

It would appear that while war has terrible 
hazards, they are not more than three times as 
great as the hazards of normal life in peace. War 
is not a safe game; neither is football; neither is 
farming; neither is running an automobile. Being 
alive is dangerous, and being in war is more danger- 
ous, but not so much more dangerous as some 
people suppose. 



OUR WAR AGAINST WAR 

Let us keep this steadily before our minds all the 
while we are fighting — that we are not fighting for 
war, but for peace. 

We hate war, and that is why we went to war. 

We love peace, and that is why we are fighting. 

Thomas Carlyle wrote a paragraph about war 
in his "Sartor Resartus" which embodies not only 
the fine sarcasm of that crabbed old Scotchman, but 
the kernel of good common sense : 

What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the 
net purport and upshot of war ? To my own knowl- 
edge, for example, there dwell and toil in the 
British village of Dumdrudge usually some five hun- 
dred souls. From these, by certain "Natural Ene- 
mies" of the French, there are successively selected, 
during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. 
Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and 
nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and 
sorrow, fed them up to manhood and even trained 
87 



88 Blue Stars and Gold 

them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, 
another hammer, and the weakest can stand under 
thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much 
weeping and swearing, they are selected, all dressed 
in red, and shipped away, at the public charges, 
some two thousand miles, or, say, only to the south 
of Spain, and thirty similar French artisans, from 
a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending : till, 
at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come 
into actual juxtaposition, and thirty stands fronting 
thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway 
the word "Fire!" is given; and they blow the souls 
out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk, use- 
ful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses 
which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had 
these men any quarrel ? Busy as the devil is, not the 
smallest! They lived far enough apart; were en- 
tire strangers ; nay, in so wide a Universe there was 
even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual 
helpfulness between them. How then ? Simpleton ! 
Their governors had fallen out; and instead of 
shooting one another, they had the cunning to make 
these poor blockheads shoot. Alas! so it is in the 
Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still 
as of old, what deviltry soever Kings do, the Greeks 
must pay the piper! In that fiction of the English 
Smollet, it is true, the final cessation of war is per- 
haps prophetically shadowed forth ; where the two 
"Natural Enemies" in person take each a tobacco- 



Our War Against War 89 

pipe filled with brimstone, light the same, and smoke 
in one another's faces, till the weaker gives in ; but 
from such predicted Peace Era, what blood-filled 
trenches, and contentious centuries, may still 
divide us! 

John Ruskin also had something to say about 
war, and although he said it less trenchantly than 
Carlyle, he expressed himself quite as truly. He 
could be as crabbed as his Scotch neighbor and was 
often as one-sided and dogmatic, but in this quota- 
tion from "Unto This Last," he has gone to the 
heart of that which lifts the soldier to honor in the 
eyes of the world. 

It is this that he brings out — that the soldier 
offers himself not only to kill, but to be killed : 

Philosophically, it does not at first sight appear 
reasonable (many writers have endeavored to prove 
it unreasonable) that a peaceable and rational per- 
son, whose trade is buying and selling, should be 
held in less honor than an unpeaceable and often 
irrational person, w T hose trade is slaying. Neverthe- 
less, the consent of mankind has always, in spite of 
the philosophers, given precedence to the soldier. 

And this is right. 

For the soldier's trade, verily and essentially, is 
not slaying, but being slain. This, without well 
knowing its own meaning, the world honors it for. 
A bravo's trade is slaying ; but the world has never 



90 Blue Stars and Gold 

respected bravos more than merchants : the reason it 
honors the soldier is because he holds his life at the 
service of the state. Reckless he may be — fond of 
pleasure or of adventure — all kinds of by-motives 
and mean impulses may have determined the choice 
of his profession, and may affect (to all appear- 
ance, exclusively) his daily conduct in it; but our 
estimate of him is based on this ultimate fact — of 
which we are well assured — that, put him in a 
fortress breach, with all the pleasures of the world 
behind him, and only death and his duty in front of 
him, he will keep his face to the front; and he 
knows that this choice may be put to him at any 
moment, and has beforehand taken his part — 
virtually takes such part continually — does, in 
reality, die daily. 

But when we take Ruskin's word of just praise 
for the soldier and put it over against Carlyle's 
irony and scorn of his incredible folly, have we 
made war any the less terrible? 

Not if we have any sense. 

War is just that much more terrible in that it 
utilizes this noblest quality of sacrificial devotion, 
and knows no better form of utilization than to 
shoot it down on the battlefield. 

No, no. War is wicked. It is foolish. Let no 
pride of our soldiers ever make us proud of war. 

We are ashamed before God and humanity that 



Our War Against War 91 

we had to go to war. We are proud only of this 
one thing — that when the time came that we had 
to go to war, the manhood of our nation did not 
flinch from the test. 

Let us fight this war through to victory. 

And let it be the world's last great war. 

We cannot afford to fight gently. The most 
wicked thing we now could do would be to enter 
this war feebly. The hour has come to strike, and 
the hour has come to strike hard. To go into this 
war cautiously, with small forces and a purpose to 
strike mild blows, would be bloody murder. If 
we want a short war, we must prepare for a long 
one. If we want to save life, we must strike hard. 
We must fight this war to a finish if we love peace. 

And because we are fighting, not merely to win 
this war but to end all war, let us not cease till we 
see it through. 



See It Through 
By Edgar A. Guest 

There are many to cheer when the battle begins, 

There are many to shout for the right ; 
There are many to rail at the world and its sin, 

But few have the grit for the fight. 
There are thousands to start with a rush for the fray 

When the fighting seems easy to do, 
But when danger is present and rough is the way, 

The few have to see the job through. 

It is easy to quit with a battle unwon, 

It is hard to press on to success; 
It is easy to stop with a purpose undone, 

It is hard to encounter distress. 
And many will march when the roadway is clear 

And the glorious goal is in view, 
But the many, too often, when dangers appear, 

Aren't willing to see the fight through. 

They weaken in spirit when trials grow great, 

They flinch at the clashing of steel; 
They talk of the strength of the foe at the gate 

And whine at the hurts that they feel. 
92 



See It Through 93 

They begin to regret having ventured for right, 

They sigh that they dared to be true, 
They haven't the heart they once had for the fight, 

They don't want to see the job through. 

We have set out to battle for justice and truth, 

We have fearful disasters to meet; 
We shall weep for the best of our manliest youth, 

We shall suffer the pangs of defeat. 
But let us stand firm for the cause that we plead, 

Let the many be brave with the few ; 
The cry of the quitter let none of us heed 

Till we've done what we started to do. 



CAN WE FIGHT WITHOUT HATRED? 

Some of the graces of personal and national life 
are best promoted under the inspiration of peace. 
It will be a glad day for the world when wars cease 
and nations beat their swords into plowshares. But 
that day has not yet come. It belongs to us to 
cultivate now those strong elements in character 
which grow out of the conditions of conflict. Life 
is a soldier's battle. Courage and patriotism call 
for a devotion for which men must sometimes die. 
It belongs to us to find those qualities of soul which 
can be cultivated in the conditions which our nation 
is facing. 

Can we fight effectively without hatred? Can 
we go to war and still obey the royal law of love? 
It will be difficult. War thrives on hatred, and 
that is one of the worst facts about it. Nations 
have fought largely because of their lust for ter- 
ritory, or their hatred of each other. Can America 
go to war and keep her heart free from the corro- 
sion of hate? 

94 



Can We Fight Without Hatred! 95 

If we are to fight without hatred and yet fight 
effectively it will need to be because we hold clearly 
in mind some high and altruistic ideal, which our 
conflict is waged to strengthen. We must find a 
substitute for hatred in a larger love. We must 
seek a nobler motive than that of territorial con- 
quest in our conviction that we are fighting the bat- 
tle of humanity. Not solely or even chiefly for the 
protection of our commerce, nor even solely for 
the upholding of our national honor, do we fight, 
but that human rights may be secure and the liber- 
ties of all men made larger. So long as small na- 
tions are in peril of invasion by large ones under 
plea of military necessity; so long as citizens of 
neutral nations are liable to destruction without 
warning by the deliberate act of nations at war; 
so long as humanity is compelled to struggle on its 
upward path, weighed down by the heavy cross of 
militarism and autocratic despotism, there will be 
something which humanity may and ought to fight 
for. For two and a half years America kept out 
of the conflict and hoped and prayed that she might 
continue to keep out, but the battle now is on. We 
are fighting not for greed or hatred but for the 
heritage of humanity. 

There are times when the plowshare must be 
beaten back into a sword again, and this is one of 
the times. 

We are fighting not alone for our country and 



96 Blue Stars and Gold 

our flag; we are fighting also for the rights of all 
the children of men. 

Can we fight without hatred ? Can we wage suc- 
cessful warfare and at the same time love our 
enemies? It will not be easy to do so, but it is not 
impossible. Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. 
Grant did not hate the men against whom they 
fought; and out of that war, which no foreign 
nation forced upon us, we emerged a free and 
united nation. When we went into Cuba, we did 
not hate the Spaniards. William McKinley loved 
his enemies, and Captain Jack Philip restrained his 
men in the moment of victory out of sympathy for 
his conquered and dying foes. Our marines 
marched with those of the European nations from 
the coast to Peking to rescue our ambassador and 
our missionaries at the time of the Boxer outbreak. 
We did not hate the Chinese but gave them back 
the indemnity to which we were entitled. We have 
learned, measurably, how to fight without hatred. 
This present war will put a far greater strain upon 
us in that regard. Let us pray God not only for a 
victory over those whom we must fight, but for that 
greater conquest which is the mastery of our own 
spirit. God has lessons to teach us as well as other 
nations. Let us be ready to learn those lessons. 

And let us be sure what we are fighting for. Not 
for territory. Germany does not own a foot of soil 
that we covet. Not for indemnity. Germany is 



Can We Fight Without Hatred? 97 

an impoverished nation, and we do not need her 
money, and if she could pay it, we would much pre- 
fer that she should pay it to Belgium. Not for 
revenge, and not for glory. I do not believe either 
of these have entered into our motives as a nation. 
We are fighting for nothing less than the in- 
herent rights of mankind. We are fighting to re- 
buke the affirmation that treaties are to be regarded 
as scraps of paper. We are fighting to disprove 
the alleged right of large nations to gain their place 
in the sun at the expense of small nations' place on 
the map. We are fighting for the freedom of the 
seas. We are fighting for the sanctity of the soil. 
We are fighting that the world may rise above the 
wicked and cruel despotism that now crushes it, 
from the load of armament and wasteful taxation 
that now overburdens it, to the enjoyment of an 
abiding peace that is based upon righteousness and 
international justice. We have a righteous cause, 
an unselfish cause, a cause worth sacrifice and de- 
votion. We are fighting for the heritage of 
humanity. 



THE RELIGION OF THE GOOD 
SHEPHERD 

I have friends who cannot make themselves be- 
lieve that war is ever right. I honor these good 
people, and I could almost be one of them. Almost, 
but not quite. Difficult as it for me to bring myself 
to favor war, I believe that there are times when a 
nation has no moral right to shirk that duty. 

Some of these good people have been telling me 
that they believe in the religion of Jesus, the religion 
of the Good Shepherd. I also believe in that re- 
ligion, and I think I know better than some of my 
friends appear to know, what that religion is. 

No figure in the New Testament took earlier or 
firmer hold on the imagination of the church than 
that of the Good Shepherd. It has been said that 
for the first three centuries, before creeds had 
reached the point of fixed definition, the religion of 
the church was the religion of the Good Shepherd. 
He was all that was good. 

But the Good Shepherd was something more 
than a gentle bearer of lambs. He was a vigorous 



The Religion of the Good Shepherd 99 

fighter of dogs. The good shepherd, as now seen 
in Palestine (and I have seen him there) carries no 
crook, but a club. He never carried a crook. He 
always had a weapon. One end of it he used for 
such gentle prodding as he found necessary, and 
the other for serious business. The rod and the 
staff are not two articles, but one, and it is primarily 
a club. It was so in Jesus' day; it is so now in 
Palestine. The good shepherd gives his life for 
the sheep, if necessary, not by lying down and let- 
ting the wolves eat him, but by defending the sheep 
so vigorously that if, at last, he is conquered, he 
leaves a dozen dead or badly bruised wolves around 
him, the sheep meanwhile having had time to run 
away and hide. 

The Good Shepherd is very gentle with the 
sheep, and a stern disciplinarian as well, but he is 
not in the least gentle toward wolves and dogs. 

Jesus did not call this to the mind of those who 
heard Him speak of Himself as the Good Shep- 
herd, because He was speaking about the shep- 
herd's attitude toward the flock. But He could not 
be a good and gentle shepherd toward the flock if 
He did not carry a big stick with heavy nails in its 
business-end, available for dogs and wolves and 
sheep thieves. 

The Good Shepherd, as Jesus and those who 
heard Him had the figure in mind, was not a person 
to trifle with. 



100 Blue Stars and Gold 

One-half of the religion of the Good Shepherd 
is the religion of the big stick. 

Those who like a pleasing picture may think of 
the Good Shepherd as carrying a crook; but there 
is not a shepherd's crook between Dan and 
Beersheba, and there never was. But there are, 
and from the days of the patriarchs there have 
been, thousands of good shepherds, including Moses 
and David, sufficiently armed so that David could 
kill the lion and the bear, and Moses could fight 
off a half dozen ruffians that were bullying the 
daughters of Jethro. 

How can disciples of the meek and gentle Jesus 
engage in armed conflict? It is indeed a distress- 
ing question, and it shames us that it should need to 
be asked. 

But who told you that Jesus was gentle and 
meek? Where did you get that impression? Was 
it the manner in which He addressed the scribes and 
Pharisees? Was it the way in which He sent the 
swine of Gadara down hill, heels over head into 
the water? Was it the stern word of malediction 
addressed to the fruitless fig-trees? 

The farther back we carry our critical study of 
the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the 
clearer it becomes that the original picture of Jesus 
preserved in apostolic tradition and the earliest 
Christian literature was that of a much sterner per- 
son than our mild modern imagination has pictured. 



The Religion of the Good Shepherd 101 

But, it is remembered, Jesus suffered without 
resistance, when He could have had ten legions of 
angels sent out in wrath against the cruel city and 
its apostatized hierarchy. 

He had them. The ten legions came, and more 
than ten. That generation did not pass till all the 
terrible things came to pass, and they were the very 
things He had declared would come, and for the 
reason He declared. The destruction of Jerusalem 
stands, not as an isolated event, but as an integral 
part of the messianic plan; it was the type and 
essential feature of His coming. 

Jesus was a belligerent. The triumphal entry 
was a war measure. It was an act of invasion. As 
Scipio carried the war into Africa, so did Jesus, at 
the zenith of His campaign of preparedness, carry 
the war into the temple. He went armed. He car- 
ried a whip. It was made of "small cords," that 
is, cords smaller than tent-ropes, but cords that had 
been used in fastening up bales of merchandise for 
transportation on the backs of camels and mules, 
cords that had a sting in them. 

"But He did not strike anybody." 

How do you know that He did not ? 

"Because He was too gentle to have struck any- 
one." 

He was not too gentle to have done it if He 
did it. 

It is not definitely stated that He struck anyone, 



102 Blue Stars and Gold 

nor is it denied that He did. The whip was no 
bluff, no lie. It was a weapon, a thing to be feared. 
If He did not strike anyone, it was not because He 
was either physically or morally incapable of hav- 
ing done so. It was because offenders recognized 
their danger and got out of the way. 

Jesus came as the Prince of Peace. But He came 
to bring both peace and a sword. Pray God the 
time may come when all the swords of earth shall 
be sheathed forever. But be not too sure that 
Jesus was too gentle to oppose the wrong. A part 
of His gentleness was tremendously militant. 



THE HEALTH OF OUR BOYS 

One of the things we fathers and mothers are 
most anxious about is the health of our boys in 
military and naval service. Beside the perils of 
the battlefield, is there not grave peril from 
disease? 

Yes, there is. 

In the past it has been a greater peril than the 
battlefield itself. 

As the vast army of Sennacherib was defeated 
not by battle but by pestilence, so in every war 
men die in large numbers as the result of disease. 

In our Civil War the number who died as the 
result of bullets was small as compared with those 
who died of disease. 

But there never has been a war in which the 
health of the men at arms was so well guarded as 
in this one. 

As for the Navy, it has conditions of cleanliness 
which almost defy disease. Admiral Braisted, 
Surgeon-General of the Navy, in an address before 

103 



104 Blue Stars and Gold 

the American Medical Association in Chicago, 

said: 

So far as the health of the personnel of the Navy- 
is concerned, of nearly half a million men, it is run- 
ning about as it does in peace times. At the end of 
the first week of June, our casualties, deaths, for all 
diseases in the navy was only 2.8 per cent, a very 
excellent showing for the whole length of the war. 
From casualties due to disease in every quarter of 
the globe, casualties due to accidents, casualties due 
to military activities, etc., we have lost out of the 
half a million men which we now have about four 
men a day on an average. When I first figured that 
up, it seemed to me that it must be impossible that 
the mortality should have been so small as that. Of 
course the conditions that exist in the naval service 
are far better than you find them in civil conditions 
in every way. Nowhere can you find sanitation that 
compares with that we have in the navy. 

In the matter of the health of the army, it is re- 
assuring to have an article from France by Major 
Richard C. Cabot of the Army Medical Corps, 
which the censor permitted to pass absolutely un- 
altered. This article appeared in the July number 
of the American Magazine: 

Just now the American army both in France and 
in America has been very considerably afflicted with 
contagious diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis, 
scarlet fever, mumps and measles. These are 



The Health of Our Boys 105 

diseases from which every new army suffers during 
the earlier stages of its development. To have them 
and to get through with them may be said to be a 
part of the process by which troops are "seasoned" 
for their work. 

When these diseases have occurred among Ameri- 
can troops in France, they have been treated, so far 
as I have been able to ascertain and so far as my 
own observation goes, far more skillfully than the 
same diseases are usually treated in civil life at 
home. The diagnosis has been made earlier and the 
most effective weapons for combating disease, anti- 
meningitis serum for instance, have been applied 
more promptly and more skillfully in France than 
is usually the case in civil life in America. 

In sharp contrast with the conditions which ex- 
isted in the Spanish War of 1898, the amount of 
typhoid fever among American troops in France 
has been reduced almost to zero by the constant and 
thorough application of anti-typhoid vaccination 
and by the greatly improved sanitation of military 
camps. In another of the great armies now fighting 
in Europe, the neglect of anti-typhoid vaccination 
during the early years of the war resulted in thou- 
sands of cases of typhoid. That we have been 
spared. Not only by means of anti-typhoid vaccina- 
tion, but by careful provision for pure drinking 
water in the regions occupied by our troops, we are 
doing everything that can be done to prevent the 
disease which caused more deaths in the Spanish 
War than all the wounds received in the field ! The 



106 Blue Stars and Gold 

same precautions will go far to minimize, if not 
absolutely to prevent, the dysenteries for which we 
must be on the lookout in our armies during the 
summer of 1918. . . . 

In the eight months that I have been in France, 
I have seen fair samples of all the types of English, 
French and American hospitals, and I can say 
without any hesitation that our own hospitals are 
better supplied with doctors, nurses, beds, food, and 
with the paraphernalia of medical and surgical 
treatment, than any others that I have seen. Our 
surgeons are keenly alive to all that experience has 
taught us during this war regarding the best treat- 
ment of wounds and burns. American surgeons 
have enjoyed abundant opportunity to visit both 
English and French hospitals, and to study their 
methods. They have been given ample facilities 
for carrying out these or any other methods that 
they may prefer in the hospitals erected or adapted 
for the use of American troops in France. 



THE SOUL OF THE SOLDIER 

I think other fathers and mothers must have felt 
as I did when we saw our sons go forth to war — 
that the worst things that might possibly happen to 
them were not the things that could be done to them 
by the Germans and the Austrians. We felt, all 
of us parents, that the worst foes of our sons were 
those who might kill their character. 

We have reason for this fear. Kipling has told 
us that "single men in barracks don't turn into 
plaster saints." The associations of war are ab- 
normal. They uproot young men from home en- 
vironment and home restraints, and surrounds them 
with influences not all of which can possibly be 
helpful. 

Life in the army is a great leveler. The tendency 
to level down is greater than the tendency to level 
up. But we have cheering words from both sides 
of the water. 

The President of the United States and his sec- 
retaries of War and of the Navy were not unmoved 

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108 Blue Stars and Gold 

by the prospect that our American boys might be 
more injured by sexual vice and strong drink than 
by bayonet and shell. They set themselves to the 
task of protecting our boys from these over- 
mastering temptations. 

Recently Dr. John R. Mott delivered an ad- 
dress in which he spoke unreservedly of what he 
had seen of life among our soldiers : 

Right here let me pause to say that I support to 
the full what has been said as to the character of 
the American army. I know that army. More- 
over, since this war began I have seen every other 
great army on both sides of this struggle and have 
seen them intimately, with the exception of the 
Turkish army and certain armies of the Balkan 
States; and I am free to say that with the possible 
exception of the Canadian army — and I am not 
sure I should make that exception — there has gone 
forth to those European shores, or risen up in those 
European islands and on the European continent, 
no body of men averaging as high, as judged by 
every test, as this army of American young men — 
the flower of the manhood and the boyhood of this 
republic. 

I was talking with the provost marshal at one of 
the leading ports before I sailed, and he said, "That 
last lot of 8,000 American soldiers that landed here 
and crossed through the city — I gathered only four 
or five bottles from the whole crowd. " I was talk- 
ing with one of our leading generals at the front one 



The Soul of the Soldier 109 

day, and he told me of an interview that he had 
with one of the Roman Catholic chaplains. He 
said that this Roman Catholic chaplain told him 
that the week before he had had 2,000 confessions, 
and only three of those confessions told of having 
stained their garments. 

I was having luncheon two or three days later 
with General Pershing, and with great eagerness 
he ventured to say that in his judgment not in the 
history of mankind has there been a body of men 
averaging higher in personality and character going 
forward on a more important errand and animated 
by purer motives or higher principles. I wish the 
whole American people could have looked into his 
eyes and have heard his vibrating voice as he spoke 
with such intimate knowledge and conviction. . . . 

I was talking with General Edwards, one of our 
generals overseas, and I was asking him to explain 
why it was that our young soldiers, not acquainted 
with war, had conducted themselves so splendidly 
as they had. Just the hour while we were in his 
office I had heard the report how they had been 
caught between the barrage of the enemy and our 
own, through some mistake, and they had been 
punished for hours without being caused to waver. 
I said, "General, how do you explain it all?" He 
reflected a moment and gave this answer, which I 
shall ever treasure: "Mr. Mott, I trace it to the 
tradition of the American mother." 

What a splendid answer! Who can measure 
the anchoring, the conserving, the inspiring power 



110 Blue Stars and Gold 

of American mothers as now being evidenced under 
the impossible strain of this war? 

Again I say a colossal burden of responsibility 
rests upon us to be true to these mothers, to per- 
petuate and carry forward their ministry. 

William T. Ellis sent an important article from 
Europe to the Boston Transcript in which he said: 

Here in France among the soldiers a new and 
elemental conception of religion has developed. It 
has little creed, and certainly no sectarianism. 
Ecclesiastics back home might be startled into some- 
thing like awakeness could they but realize how lit- 
tle the things that bulk so large in their life mean 
to the soldier. These soldiers care nothing for the 
differences that divide Episcopalians and Methodists 
and Presbyterians and Baptists. They are inter- 
ested in God, whether or not he answers prayers, 
and the relation between him and the great consid- 
erations of righteousness for which the Allies stand. 
As for the shop-talk of the churches, over here they 
confess that they never were in the habit of »paying 
any attention to that. 

Three words characterize the religion of the 
American soldier — simplicity, brotherhood, and 
service. These men are convinced that the essen- 
tial righteousness of our cause makes it God's 
cause. If we have much at stake in this war, God 
has more. Therefore, they are serving Him when 
they go ahead in uncomplaining loyalty to do their 



The Soul of the Soldier 111 

part in winning the war. Fidelity to the task is the 
first expression of worship. 

One unexpected by-product of the rigid censor- 
ship that is maintained over all mail leaving the 
American Army is that it is now possible to know 
what the soldiers are thinking about and saying in 
the intimacy of communications home concerning 
the war and things in general 

On this point I have talked with many officers. 
All agree with the one who said : "I have been sur- 
prised to find how full the men's letters are of 
allusions to home, love, and God. They are think- 
ing a lot more about religion than I had ever sup- 
posed." There is not much talk of things religious 
among the men ; and anybody who comes over here 
looking for a "revival" of the conventional sort will 
strain his eyesight seriously before he finds it. In 
one of the Salvation Army huts a sweet-faced lassie, 
whom the men adored as a mother or sister, com- 
plained to me that the soldiers are not as keen for 
her meetings as they are for her pies and doughnuts, 
and that those who do "come under conviction" 
quickly backslide. She is looking for the sort of 
religiosity that she found in her street-meetings back 
home, and fails to realize that her noble personality 
and beautiful service are far more religious than her 
stereotyped phraseology. 

Reports from the camps and the front shows a 
revival of the spirit of Christianity. The carnage 
and brutality has developed love of country and a 



112 Blue Stars and Gold 

deeper sense of obligation to God. Many have 
expressed a willingness to give their lives, if neces- 
sary, to establish world democracy, with universal 
liberty and equal rights for all. This is most 
beautifully expressed by words found in the note 
book of an Australian soldier, who was killed at 
Gallipoli : 

Ye who have faith to look with fearless eyes 
Beyond the tragedy of a world at strife, 

And know that out of death and night shall rise 
The dawn of ampler life, 

Rejoice, whatever anguish rend the heart, 
That God has given you a priceless dower, 

To live in these great times and have your part 
In freedom's crowning hour, 

That ye may tell your sons, who see the light 
High in the heavens, their heritage to take: 

"I saw the powers of darkness put to flight, 
I saw the morning break." 



THINGS THAT ABIDE 

There is this about war, that it cannot last for- 
ever. Take comfort in that fact. War is not the 
abiding heritage of the coming humanity. Peace 
must some day come back. 

In his strong war poem, calling the British 
people to arms, Rudyard Kipling says : 

Our world has passed away, 
In wantonness o'erthrown; 

There's nothing left to-day 
But steel and fire and stone. 

Once more we hear the word 
That sickened earth of old, 

No law except the sword, 

Unsheathed and uncontrolled. 

Sad is the world on a day when such lines can be 
written. They are not without their tragic element 
of truth. 

The world has passed away. We have witnessed 

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114 Blue Stars and Gold 

the end of one of the grand divisions of human 
history. Not since the French Revolution has any 
man seen the earth on the edge of such an abyss 
as now opens beneath the feet of the human race. 
The old world, the world into which we were born, 
has passed. We are back again in chaos. The 
world has passed away. 

We shall need a new geography when it is over. 
Not only shall we need a new map of Europe, with 
new boundary lines of nations, and ominous blank 
spaces where there were populous cities, but we 
shall need a new map of Africa and a new atlas of 
the oceans. The world will need a new gazetteer, 
a new political economy, a new series of books of 
history. We shall have a new vocabulary, a new 
heaven and a new earth. 

But to-day is there nothing left but "steel and 
fire and stone"? Is there no law save "the sword, 
unsheathed and uncontrolled?" 

The Word of God has its answer : "Now abide 
faith, hope, love, these three." These three ! And 
not the other three — "steel and fire and sword"? 
Yes, these three, faith, hope, love. They abide 
now. They will abide after the sword has drunk 
its fill and been sheathed in glutted weariness, after 
the fire has blazed high and burned out, after the 
stone has crumbled under the bombardment of man 
and the frosts of the winters of God. Still will 
abide faith, hope, love, these three. 



Things That Abide 115 



i t> 



They abide now. The men who are killing each 
other love their wives and babies more than they 
hate each other. They do not really hate each 
other. They will be kind to each other on the bat- 
tlefield when they can. There will be lucid moments 
in their war-madness when their real manhood will 
assert itself. Spite of the murder, rape, arson and 
blind fury that go with war, love and hope and 
faith are the abiding realties. 

Let us not make the mistake of calling faith, 
hope and love the three graces. A pagan poet 
called them that and we have fallen into his way of 
speaking of them. Graces are mere ornaments of 
life, elements of beauty put on afterward like stuc- 
co bas-reliefs' on walls that stand alone. Faith, 
hope, love are the length, breadth and height of life 
itself. They are the three inevitables. 

Inevitables? Yes, for to them we must come 
back. After the fury of war we must have peace. 
The world can not fight forever. 

But when the tumult and the shouting have died, 
then what? 

Then men must go back to their desolated homes, 
and their impoverished farms, and their burned' 
workshops, and take up life again. 

And why take it up again? Why not let the 
world go to smash, and give up the whole problem ? 
Because we still have unconquerable hopes. Be- 
cause we still have faith in God and man and gov- 



116 Blue Stars and Gold 

ernment. Because men still love, and labor, and 
sacrifice. 

That is the very thing Paul said. After the 
thunder of the guns has died down, and the dead 
have been buried, and the tears of the women and 
children have been wiped away, still there are God 
and life and duty. Still abide these three, not stone 
and fire and steel, but the other three, which are 
much more enduring. "Now abide faith, hope, 
love, these three." 



THE BATTLE OF LIFE 

There might have been a world without strife 
or struggle, but it would have been a very different 
world from this. The Bible is a book of peace, 
but it rings with the clash of arms. Its best promise 
is peace with God, and peace with man, and peace 
with our own consciences. But the way to that 
peace is the way of battle. 

Man's first battle was with the beasts. He came 
into a world already inhabited. If Nature owes 
any form of life a living, she has not acknowledged 
the debt. All forms of life must fight for a place 
to stand, while they fight to live. And man fought 
with the life about him. That battle is won. We 
capture timid specimens of the few surviving beasts 
and keep them behind bars that our children may 
know what sort of things they were that kept our 
fathers in terror. 

And not alone by extermination has man won the 
battle with the beasts ; he has won by subjugation 
and domestication. He who first caught a wild dog 

117 



118 Blue Stars and Gold 

and tamed the wolf-like creature conquered at the 
same time the wolf in his own soul and learned self- 
mastery, kindness, patience and other human 
graces. That was the best conquest of all. Civiliza- 
tion rests more than we have commonly thought on 
the traits that grew in the lives of men in the mas- 
tery of life about them. And that battle is fought, 
and the double victory is won. 

Then comes the battle with savage tribes. As 
civilization advanced this clash was inevitable, and 
it is irrepressible. There is no corner of this earth 
from the glacial north to the torrid zone where a 
savage has any other ultimate alternative than civ- 
ilization or extermination. The battle is not quite 
over, but the habitable earth is in possession of 
civilization and we may record another victory. 

Then there is the long battle for manhood's 
rights, for the extension of the frontiers of human- 
ity itself. It has been a long, hard fight; it is not 
finished. That battle is still on. We are far enough 
along in the fight to see where the flags must be 
planted in the recognition of freedom and the prin- 
ciple of government for the common good. And 
that is one long march toward victory. 



NOT TOO CHEAP A PEACE 

We must not hope for a premature peace. 

The roots of this war go deep, and they must be 
pulled up from the depths. 

The prophet Jeremiah knew something about 
surgery, and of the danger of superficial healing of 
deep wounds, for he denounced those who would 
"heal lightly the hurt of my people, saying, Peace, 
peace, when there is no peace." 

All common good hath common price, 

Exceeding good, exceeding; 
Christ bought the keys of Paradise 

With cruel bleeding. 

There come times when men must be willing to 
die for their principles. The foundations of our 
liberties are cemented with the blood of those who 
have suffered for us in other days. 

We must fight this war through till we are as- 
sured that its issue will prevent other wars, and 
evils worse than war. 

119 



120 Blue Stars and Gold 

There are four outstanding reasons why we 
must win this war: 

First, there is a military reason. If Germany 
wins this war, or if it ends otherwise than in a de- 
cision against her, the armies of the world will be 
reorganized on the German plan, and Clausewitz 
will be undisputed master of the world. The army 
will be, as Emperor William says it is, "the one 
pillar of the State." The army will have, as 
Emperor William says, a single will and that the 
will of a despot. The army will have one article 
in its creed, and that will be the creed of Clause- 
witz — that no moral considerations can be recog- 
nized in war, which is the application of force un- 
checked by any ethical or humanitarian considera- 
tions. Make no mistake about this. Whether 
other armies acknowledge it or not, that is the way 
they will be trained to fight if Germany wins this 
war. 

Second, there is a diplomatic reason. We must 
win this war; if we should fail, Germany's hateful 
and immoral spy system will become accepted in 
the diplomacy of the world. No nation will accept 
the plighted word of any other nation. Every 
nation will believe and have reason to believe that 
every other nation is its secret enemy, and by means 
of bribery, perjury, and every possible form of 
intrigue, it will carry its system of deceit and hos- 
tility into every nation with which it has diplomatic 



Not Too Cheap a Peace 121 

dealings, and will do it all under the camouflage of 
peace and international good will. Our hired foes 
will exist all the way from the offices of the State 
Department to our own kitchens, and the same will 
be true all over the earth. 

Third, there is an industrial reason. If Ger- 
many wins, all industry will be put on a war basis. 
The competition for the markets of the world, 
already so keen that it has been unjustly denomi- 
nated "cut-throat competition,' , will be carried 
farther, as Germany has carried it in her cartel 
system, which is a system of trusts, protected and 
stimulated by government differentials. Govern- 
ment-controlled railroads and government-subsi- 
dized steamship lines will carry the products of 
government-fostered industries into the ports of 
the world, not simply to gain markets for the years 
of peace, but to establish relationships that can be 
utilized in the certain event of war. 

Not only so, but every new factory erected in 
our own country will be erected with a view to its 
possible utilization in the manufacture of muni- 
tions. Not only will the armies and navies of all 
nations be maintained on a basis of preparedness 
never before dreamed of, but every man who un- 
dertakes to erect a factory for the manufacture of 
sewing machines or typewriters, or gas stoves, will 
be required to submit his blue prints to a Govern- 
ment inspector; who will consider before the per- 



122 Blue Stars and Gold 

mit is issued whether the building will require 
essential modifications in case the Government 
should take it over at an hour's notice for the 
manufacture of shrapnel. Not in our own land 
only, but in all the world, the plowshares of hu- 
manity will be hammered out with primary refer- 
ence to their easy convertability into swords. Even 
in the midst of peace, war will continually be the 
mainspring of our industrial life. 

Fourth, there is an educational reason. If Ger- 
many should win, our whole educational system 
would be transformed. Our schools and colleges 
would no longed focus their curriculum upon the 
humanities. The natural sciences, especially physics 
and chemistry, would be the end and aim of a 
liberal education. Every college laboratory would 
become an experiment station in the manufacture 
of poison gas. Every high school student would 
be taught new processes that might be utilized in 
the manufacture of high explosives. Our whole 
system of education from the grammar school to 
the university would crystallize around the ability 
to discover methods of murder. 

These are the reasons why we must not heed the 
cry for premature peace. We are fighting for the 
children's children of coming days, to save them 
from all that now threatens the welfare of the 
world. And we must see it through. 



GOD IS LOVE 

Let us not wait for the war to be over before 
we say it to ourselves and convince ourselves that 
it is true. u God is love." 

God is power; God is justice; God is stern retri- 
bution. God is all of these and more. But all of 
these are transformable into that ultimate verity, 
that ultimate hope of humanity, which is love. 

Believe it, though the guns deny it. 

Believe it, though the powers of darkness hoot 
at it in blind defiance. 

But is it true? 

Is God really love? 

There are aspects of life so stern, so sad, that 
Tennyson may rightly oppose the faith in God's 
goodness to a superficial view of nature, and speak 
with some admiration of the man, — 

Who trusts that God is love indeed, 
And love creation's final law, 
Though Nature red in tooth and claw 

With ravin shrieks against the creed. 
123 



124 Blue Stars and Gold 

But nature is not always red in tooth and claw. 
We have heard for a generation about the struggle 
for existence. We are hearing now of the struggle 
for the existence of others. Did you ever start a 
quail from her nest, and follow her as she flew 
low and with one wing, almost within your reach? 
Did you follow her until you were well away from 
the nest, and then see the helpless wing come into 
play, and the mother bird fly cheerfully away? 
Some mother quails have lost their lives in that 
way, no doubt, but they have saved the nest. What 
has made the quail a persistent type? Strength? 
Yes. Ability to fly? Yes. Color like the turf 
and dead grass? Yes. But these are not all. 
Your list of forces will not be complete till you 
reckon in love, love that can imperil its life for 
love's sake. Did you ever see a little mother hen 
spread her feathers and give defensive battle to a 
hawk? Sometimes by the courage that love gives 
she actually drove the hawk away; sometimes she 
laid down her life for her brood; in either case 
it was love that saved the little ones. The love 
of the mother was stronger than the hunger of 
the hawk. So Nature gives eloquent witness to 
the power of the law of love. 

I see the wrong that round me lies, 

I feel the guilt within ; 
I hear, with groans and travail cries, 

The world confess its sin. 



God Is Love 125 

Yet in the maddening maze of things 

And tossed by storm and flood, 
To one fixed trust my spirit clings, 

I know that God is good. 

I know not what the future hath 

Of wonder or surprise ; 
I only know that life and death 

His mercy underlies. 

I know not where His islands lift 

Their fronded palms in air; 
I only know I cannot drift 

Beyond His love and care. 

Hold to the truth, this little truth. Never mind 
just now the rest of the creed; this is creed enough 
for the present. Believe it, and let your heart rest 
in the eternal verity, so simply uttered — just these 
three words, u God is love." 

"God is love," and love is therefore the fun- 
damental law of the universe. But that is not all. 
It is the law of individual life. What God is, 
might be of little importance to us if His life and 
ours had no points of contact; it is our vital re- 
lation that makes it a thing of eternal moment. 
God has wrought His law of love into the fabric of 
the universe, into the moral constitution of the 
world. The ultimate law of God's life is therefore 
the final law of our lives. He who is unloving 



126 Blue Stars and Gold 

wars against the ages, but the man whose heart 
is warm with God's love is in league with the 
stones in the field. 

Because love is of God, love must triumph. It 
seems weak and puny now amid the gigantic forces 
of the world's evil. But the future is assured, be- 
cause "God is love." What God is, that will the 
universe be. He then who chooses love as his 
ruling passion is in league with the ages. "Let 
us love one another, for love is of God." The 
reason is adequate, for God's will must triumph. 
Believe it spite of the apparent discord of nature, 
life preying on life, and carnage on every hand; 
believe it in the midst of political strife and cor- 
ruption; believe it in the midst of international 
strife and discord. "God is love" ; love is the bed 
rock of the moral universe; love is the eternal law 
of human life ; love is mighty and will prevail. 



SPIRITUAL PREPAREDNESS 

I am not of those who mourn that this war 
found us unprepared. 

I would rather suffer the extra loss, even of 
life, and know that in our hearts we were guilt- 
less of any lurking intent to go to war, such as 
the accumulation of arms might have stimulated, 
than to feel that in spite of our protestations that 
we loved peace, we were secretly preparing for 
war. 

We are prepared now, and what is more, we 
are preparing more and more. And we shall stay 
in till it is over. 

But there are some kinds of spiritual prepared- 
ness which we have need to cultivate. 

One is, a preparedness against those who, how- 
ever conscientiously, misguidedly endeavor to use 
the war as the occasion of false spiritual teach- 
ing. 

Another is to be ready for whatever hard les- 
sons we have to learn. 

127 



128 Blue Stars and Gold 

There is a promise of God that those who trust 
in Him "shall not be afraid of evil tidings." This 
is not a promise that there shall be no evil tidings, 
but that we shall not be in terror of them before 
they come, nor be crushed by them when they ar- 
rive. 

It is a time to live normally. We are exhorted 
to practice economy, and we ought to do it. We 
are an extravagant nation, and this is a good time 
for us to learn the wholesome lesson of thrift. But 
that does not mean that we should starve ourselves, 
or fail to buy needed clothing for our family, or 
that we should cease buying good books. We do 
not want to drive the tailors or the publishers into 
bankruptcy, or bring financial ruin to any class of 
men who are doing a useful kind of work in the 
community. As a nation we are subject to ex- 
tremes but we have at bottom a solid stratum of 
good sense. It is a time when our religion ought 
to help us to a sane kind of living. 

Potatoes are expensive just now, but if every 
farmer should plant all his farm in potatoes we 
should suffer for lack of wheat and corn, and po- 
tatoes would go to waste. There is a proper pro- 
portion in all things. 

Our religion ought to save us from foolish, petty 
and wicked spite. We are at war with Germany, 
but that does not mean that we should refuse to 
lend a hoe to a neighbor, who happens to have 



Spiritual Preparedness 129 

been born in Germany, or that our children should 
quarrel with his children. That does not mean that 
we should cease to play German music, or show in 
any other unreasonable way hatred for things 
German. 

We must prosecute the war with our whole 
strength and unswerving resolution, but we must 
fight without the wasteful folly of petty hatred. 

We should exercise good sense in our charity. 
We ought to support the Red Cross, and the In- 
ternational Y. M. C. A. But to withhold a dollar 
from the missionary contribution, or from the 
poor of our own town to give to the Red Cross 
is not philanthropy nor Christian charity. The 
dollar we give to the Red Cross should be an ex- 
tra dollar. We ought to buy a Liberty Bond, but 
we ought not to sell a railroad bond or good farm 
mortgage to do it, nor do anything to lessen the 
value of any needed public utility, or home indus- 
try. We must keep the farms going, and the 
workshops busy, or we shall have nothing to fight 
with. 

Let us not be subject to panics at any time. Let 
us school ourselves to endure hardness as good 
soldiers of the Lord. Let us prepare ourselves 
for some disappointments and defeats and not 
be panic-stricken when they occur. 

In the long run the thing that is morally right 
is commercially profitable. Year by year and cen- 



130 Blue Stars and Gold 

tury by century righteousness justifies itself. Truth 
may seem to be 

Forever on the scaffold; 
Wrong forever on the throne, 

but righteousness and good sense have a common 
measure, and the gospel which is the power and 
wisdom of God justifies itself also in terms of hu- 
man prudence and good common sense. 

It is well to expect the best, but it is well also 
to be steeled in faith and fortitude for the worst 
that may yet come. Thus far America has not 
suffered very much in the world war. We have 
given a certain number of billions of dollars, and 
we have weighed out our coal with a little more 
of economy, and we have gone with a little less 
of sugar and pork. Cheer up ! We may have 
to face really stern conditions before very long. 
If the spring opens with a great drive, we may 
see casualty lists that fill pages of the papers, and 
have much beside to break our hearts. 

We have gone into this war because we believe 
that a righteous God will aid a righteous cause and 
give the world peace established in righteousness. 
If, as a step toward this, we go through the pride 
of Jordan, let us do it bravely. 

Robert Browning, comfortable in an Italian 
villa, with nothing worse to worry him than an 
irate father-in-law back in England whom he was 



Spiritual Preparedness 131 

not likely to meet, and with cash enough on hand 
to pay his expenses, and a mild sky overhead and 
genial warmth in the atmosphere, could write in 
a jingle as easy as a rocking-chair, — 

Grow old along with me, 
The best is yet to be, — 

The last of life for which the first was made. 

That is good doctrine. It ought to be preached 
often. But not every one can have this comforting 
assurance that "the best is yet to be." Jeremiah was 
warned in advance that the worst was yet coming, 
and it grew worse all the time. It never got any 
better, so far as he was concerned. Life was 
just one unhappy thing after another. 

When Jeremiah poured out his complaint to 
God on this account, he received this answer : 

"If thou hast run with the footmen and they 
have wearied thee, how shalt thou contend with 
the horses? And though in a land of peace thou 
art secure, yet what wilt thou do in the pride of 
Jordan?" 

In other words, "Cheer up; the worst is yet to 
come !" 

It is only a brave and a great man whom God 
can safely address in this fashion. God knew that 
Jeremiah would not collapse under that crushing 
information, but would nerve himself for what 
was impending. Jeremiah did it. 



132 Blue Stars and Gold 

There still are a few shallow people who think 
Jeremiah weak because he wept. All intelligent 
readers of the Bible know that Jeremiah was the 
most heroic soul in all the Old Testament. There 
ought to be some penalty for those who attempt 
to describe any man, and especially any Bible char- 
acter, in terms of a single adjective. When this is 
done the first man to be stood against the wall 
in the gray dawn to await the action of the firing 
squad will be the man who named Jeremiah "the 
weeping prophet." He wept but he did not falter. 
He was like the soldier who said to his shaking 
knees, "You tremble with fear, and if you knew 
where I am going to make you take me, you would 
tremble worse!" That is the kind of weeping 
Jeremiah did, His were the tears of a hero. 



The Inevitable 
By Sarah Knowles Bolton 

I like the man who faces what he must 

With step triumphant and a heart of cheer, 
Who fights the daily battle without fear, 

Sees his hopes fail, yet keeps unfaltering trust 
That God is God — that somehow, true and just, 

His plans work out for mortals; not a tear 
Is shed when fortune, which the world holds dear, 

Falls from his grasp; better with love a crust, 
Than living in dishonor; envies' not 

Nor loses faith in man, but does his best, 
Nor even murmurs at his humbler lot, 

But, with a smile and words of hope, gives zest 
To every toiler. He alone is great 

Who, by a life heroic, conquers fate. 



133 



THE HAZARD OF FAITH 

Some one has written most interestingly of the 
moment of supreme peril in the life of the mos- 
quito. It is when, having passed through several 
changes to adapt its life to the water in which 
it is born, it leaves the water behind. It finds itself 
possessed of wings and an instinct to use them, 
and it makes its way out of the water. It has never 
been on land, and no mosquito has returned from 
the shore to assure its companions in the water- 
world. Its wings are wet and untried; there is no 
one to teach it how to use them; there is no one 
to help it up the bank; it faces a most appalling 
peril, one that is fatal to millions of mosquitoes. 
But all the mosquitoes that survive are those who 
make the venture. 

Now that is an analogy for faith. For here I 
am, an inhabitant of the world in which I was 
born, with wings that have never been spread, and 
impelled by an inward impulse toward a life which 
faith alone reveals, and I make that venture of 

134 



The Hazard of Faith 135 

faith. I dare declare myself a child of the Gad 
I have never seen, and a citizen of the heaven 
where I have never been. And I choose to climb 
the banks, and leave the lower level for that of 
faith. The choice is not without its perils, but it 
is that which gives my soul companionship with 
God. It is the mightiest moment in the evolu- 
tion of the soul — the moment in which it accepts 
its high-born destiny by an act of faith in the un- 
seen. Some men have faltered and fallen back, 
but the career of those who have succeeded is the 
history of the spiritual progress of the human 
race. 

There is no known process by which the soul 
can reach its spiritual heritage by passivity. We 
may not sit idly and await our transformation into 
the divine image by processes external to ourselves. 
If we are saved into our spiritual heritage, it will 
be first because God has appointed us heirs of 
salvation, and ordained the means for our evolu- 
tion into the liberty of the glory of the children of 
God; and secondly, because we respond to the act 
of God by a mighty effort of faith, by which we 
know and appropriate our divine heritage. 

The earlier theories of evolution assumed that 
the progress of the world is by exceedingly slow 
and painfully laborious processes. This still is 
partly true. But the advancement of life is also 
by opportune and decisive leaps and bounds. There 



136 Blue Stars and Gold 

are sudden and immediate transitions by which a 
form of life rises instantaneously to claim a higher 
sphere as its own. The experience of the mosquito 
is repeated in varying forms in the metamorphosis 
of other types. And it is analogous to spiritual 
transformation, in which faith faces its problems 
and its privileges. The evolution of the human 
soul is an appeal to faith in an unseen God, a haz- 
ardous, pilgrimage toward an unrealized destiny. 
All about us are the evidences of our relations with 
the world of matter, but within us is the impulse 
of the indwelling God, who made us in his own 
image. 

The triumph of faith in human life causing men 
to assert their divine heritage, is the supreme fact 
in evolution, and is analogous to a thousand facts 
which have marked the progress of life from its 
beginnings. It is the determination of a being 
made in the image of God to declare himself 
related not alone to the dust but also and supremely 
to the Deity. 



The Haven of Faith 

By Eleanor Baldwin 

Ah, love, if death were death and nothing more, 

And hell of war and thrust of sabre gave 

Only thy length within thy narrow grave, 

Cross-marked and bare, upon a foreign shore, 

Earth's bitter dust and inward-swinging door, 

Then had I bound thy strength and scorned to brave 

The sacrifice that sent thee forth to save 

The land which heard our cry in years of yore. 

If this were all, this heavy hour of pain, 

And Heaven were but a fabled Paradise, 

(Whence came the soul, and whither should it go?) 

If Hope were barren, and I ne'er again 

Should know that wondrous light within thine eyes, 

I had not dared, dear heart, to love thee so! 



137 



DOES GOD CARE? 

If we knew the answer to this question, we could 
bear anything. If we really could feel sure that it 
mattered to God what happens to us, we could 
suffer and not be heartbroken. 

I have had a long hunt for a poem, and have 
just found it. I do not know who wrote it, but it 
utters the cry of many a heart, — "My heart cries 
out for a God who cares." 

What can it mean? Is it aught to Him 

That the nights are long and the days are dim? 

Can He be touched by the grief I bear, 

Which saddens the heart and whitens the hair? 

About His throne are eternal calms, 

And the strong, glad music of happy psalms, 

And bliss unruffled by any strife. 

How can He care for my little life? 

And yet I want Him to care for me 
While I live in this world where sorrows be ! 
138 



Does God Care? 139 

When the lights die down from the path I take, 
When strength is feeble and friends forsake, 
When love and music that once did bless 
Have left me to silence and loneliness, 
And my life-song changes to sobbing prayers, 
Then my heart cries out for a God who cares. 

When shadows hang over the whole day long, 
And my spirit is bowed with shame and wrong, 
When I am not good, and the deeper shade 
Of conscious sin makes my heart afraid, 
And this busy world has too much to do 
To stay in its course to help me through, 
And I long for a Saviour — can it be 
That the God of the universe cares for me? 

O wonderful story of deathless love ! 
Each child is dear to that heart above. 
He fights for me when I cannot fight; 
He comforts me in the gloom of night; 
He lifts the burden, for He is strong; 
He stills the sigh and awakes the song; 
The sorrow that bows me down He bears, 
And loves and pardons because He cares! 

Let all who are sad take heart again; 
We are not alone in our hours of pain ; 
Our Father stoops from His throne above, 
To soothe and quiet us with His love; 



140 Blue Stars and Gold 

He leaves us not when the storm is high, 
And we have safety, for He is nigh; 
Can it be trouble, which He doth share? 
Oh, rest in peace, for the Lord will care! 

It is a precious word with which the Word of 
God answers this cry of the human heart, — "Cast- 
ing all your care upon Him, for He careth for 
you." 

"He careth!" God cares. 

Yes, and if the story of Jesus means anything, 
He not only cares, but He comes. 

He is not far away when we need Him. 

"I will not leave you desolate; I will come to 
you." 

He cares, and He comes. 

Victor Hugo once said: "He who has seen the 
sorrows of men has seen nothing; he must see the 
sorrows of women. He who sees the sorrows of 
women has seen nothing; he must see the sorrows 
of children." Might we not add to this: "He 
who has seen the sorrows of women, men and chil- 
dren has seen nothing; he must see the sorrows of 
Christ. And yet again, he who has seen the sor- 
rows of Christ has had only a suggestion of the 
infinite sorrows of God." 

God is the ultimate reality. Our thought of 
God is our uppermost and outermost mental possi- 
bility. Our experience of God is the largest and 



Does God Care? 141 

deepest of all human experiences. In our thought 
of God and in our experience of God, God him- 
self participates. 

There was a time when men thought of God 
as a monarch ruling a rebellious world. He was 
not only a king, but the king of an empire in re- 
volt. Indeed, it is no caricature of some concep- 
tions of the relation of God to the world to say 
that God was almost like the warden of a peniten- 
tiary, ruling rigorously over an unwilling body of 
criminals each one of whom deserved to hang and 
toward whom even the utmost severity short of 
eternal damnation was to be considered large and 
unmerited mercy. 

We have come to see clearly that this is not an 
adequate conception of God. God is a Father and 
the Father of all His children good and bad. 
Whatever He does by way of discipline, He does 
as a father might do. Not only so, as the father's 
life is the life of the child, so God's life is in- 
wrought into the life of the world. The sorrows 
of human life are His sorrows. God is working 
out His own diversified experience in the experi- 
ences of humanity. What we work out with fear 
and trembling, God works in us to will and to 
do His good pleasure. 

This conception of God forever does away with 
the possibility of divine heartlessness. If wicked 
men go to war and murder one another, God looks 



142 Blue Stars and Gold 

upon it not as a thing of no concern to himself, 
nor yet simply in the light of a just retribution in- 
flicted upon the ill-deserving. God's own life is in 
the struggle. The life of God is being born again 
through agony and pain. 

God suffers to redeem. Not only is He afflicted 
in the afflictions of His people, but the Angel of 
His presence saves them. God is no passive suf- 
ferer. God is no hopeless, misanthropic invalid. 
God has not settled down into a condition of meek, 
acceptance of inevitable sorrow. God suffers that 
He may save. 

The world is to be saved. The sorrows of hu- 
man life are not hopeless. He who has given us 
the cross as the triumphant expression of an ade- 
quate faith has not left us to suffer hopelessly in 
the world for which Christ died. God suffers with 
His people that He may redeem them. 



CAN GOD SHARE OUR SORROWS? 

Sam Walter Foss, who died a few years ago, 
wrote a poem with the title, "Two Gods." It said: 

A boy was born 'mid little things, 

Between a little world and sky, 
And dreamed not of the cosmic rings 

Round which the circling planets fly. 
He lived in little works and thoughts, 

Where little ventures grow and plod, 
And paced and plowed his little plots, 

And prayed unto his little God. 
But as the mighty system grew, 

His faith grew faint with many scars; 
The cosmos widened in his view — 

But God was lost among the stars. 

Another boy in lowly days, 

As he, to little things was born, 
But gathered lore in woodland ways, 

And from the glory of the morn. 
As wider skies broke on his view, 
143 



144 Blue Stars and Gold 

God greatencd in his growing mind ; 
Each year he dreamed his God anew, 

And left his older God behind. 
He saw the boundless scheme dilate, 

In star and blossom, sky and clod; 
And as the universe grew great, 

He dreamed for it a greater God. 

The poem and its title are not entirely accurate. 
God did not change : it was merely the mind of man 
that grew. That growth was not only necessary; 
it was desirable. Why should our thought of other 
things grow larger and not our thought of God? 
As our measure of the universe grows, we must 
think of God in terms of greater power, wisdom 
and love. 

Beside this, however, we must think of God in 
relation to all the moral problems of life. And 
that must give us not only a higher, but a deeper 
thought of God. Among other things it raises the 
question whether God can be perfectly happy, in 
view of the sorrows of the world. 

For myself, I cannot see how we are to retain 
the idea of a static God. God is everlastingly 
active, not as mere power but as sympathy. He 
can be touched with a feeling of our infirmities. 

This is a very sweet and wonderfully comfort- 
ing thought. It is priceless; it is worth half of 
heaven to souls in sorrow and present need. 

Good men have been afraid to admit this quality 



Can God Share Our Sorrows? 145 

in God. They have feared it would detract some- 
thing from His infinity if they admitted that He 
could feel pain. They have felt that He must be 
utterly immutable; totally beyond any experience 
of sorrow; wholly and unchangeably happy; com- 
pletely imperturbable. I do not know that I need 
an imperturbable God, but I know I need a God 
who cares. And how can He care unless He feels ? 
And how can He feel, and not suffer? I find my 
answer in Calvary. God can suffer, and suffer 
gladly, that He may help. 

But there is another thought involved in the 
idea. Not only does God help us, but He needs 
our help. The stern words of the Old Testament 
ring down the ages, cursing those who "come not 
up to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord 
against the mighty." God is not only He that 
was and is ; God is He who ever is becoming. God 
is living, not merely the infinite life of heaven, but 
is living with men the finite life of earth. 

This experience of God requires as its expres- 
sion the experience of men and women. The com- 
pleteness of the love of the Divine Father needed 
the mother love of the Virgin Mary, and needs 
mother love now, and father love now, and child 
love now, and every other sweet and holy love. 

George Bernard Shaw has lately been asking, 
"Is God in trouble?" and has been replying in the 
affirmative, and saying a great many things which 



146 Blue Stars and Gold 

I do not at all accept. But some things this bril- 
liant and erratic author says are true; and I feel 
a certain thrill of approval when he represents God 
as saying, "Stop flattering me; help me." 

Yes; God needs help. He needs us, our hands, 
our feet, our ability to talk to people who do not 
know any of the languages of heaven, but are able 
to understand English. He needs our help. 

I should be glad if I knew that God stood ready 
to help me. But when I understand not only this, 
but that I can do a few small things for a few 
short years that help Him to make his goodness 
and love more real to men, and to bring the king- 
dom of heaven closer to earth, then I feel the 
glory of living, and hope of living forever. I shall 
not live a life of eternal uselessness: I expect 
in some very little but very real way that I shall 
be helping God. 



GOD IS MARCHING ON 

Let us make it plain to ourselves that it matters 
to God who wins or loses in the battle of life. 

Humanity's interests cannot go to wreck with- 
out concern to God. 

The fall of the sparrow is of concern to Him; 
and the life of your boy or of mine is of more 
value than many sparrows. 

Man is very small. He is a mere grain of sand 
on the surface of the earth, and the earth is a 
mote in the universe. If our solar system were 
represented by a finger ring, in which our sun 
was a diamond smaller than a pin-head and the 
planets were seven tiny non-luminous stones, that 
whole solar system would be as easily lost in the 
visible universe as that ring would be if thrown 
out of the car window somewhere on a journey 
from Chicago to Minneapolis, thence to Kansas 
City, thence to Memphis, and then back again. 
It is well our little system stays in place, for if 
it got mislaid, it never could be found. Think of 

147 



148 Blue Stars and Gold 

that finger ring, and the earth a mere grain of 
dust on it, and one man an infinitesimal molecule 
of that dust. Can that man be profitable to God? 
What can it matter whether he is righteous or not? 
So Tennyson asked in his poem "Vastness" : 

He that has lived for the lust of the minute, and died in 

the doing it, flesh without mind ; 
He that has nailed his flesh to the Cross, till Self died out 

in the love of his kind ; 
Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, and all 

these old revolutions of earth; 
All new-old revolutions of empire — change of the tide — 

what is all of it worth? 
What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying 

voices of prayer? 

All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with 

all that is fair? 
What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own 

corpse-cofHns at last, 
Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drowned in the 

depths of a meaningless Past? 
What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom of a moment's 

anger of bees in their hive? 
Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and loved him forever; 

the dead are not dead, but alive. 

This is the answer that love gives — that life is 
profitable; that love will have its will, that love 
makes life immortal. But this is the cry of the 



God Is Marching On 149 

heart of man: have we any assurance that these 
values are real with God? 

The universe is big. If Columbus had been 
sailing to the moon he could have reached it in a 
dozen years, sailing at the same rate of speed that 
brought him from Spain to America; but if he 
had sailed toward the sun he would not yet have 
arrived, not even if he had sailed the Lusitania 
and had never stopped for coal. Had he started 
for one of the outer planets of our own solar 
system and kept going until now, he would need 
to have taken an express train. Indeed, that would 
have arrived too late, for a cannonball fired on 
the morning of July 4, 1776, would just about now 
be reaching Neptune, and Neptune, you will re- 
member, is one of the other six little stones in our 
finger ring. 

But even the mote may have importance. It 
can clog the wheels of a watch. It can carry a 
disease germ. It can contain the potency of an 
electric spark. It can do damage or good quite 
out of proportion to its bulk. 

It is not in mere bulk that we count with God. 
There are times when one man is more than an 
army. There are occasions when a very humble 
man rises to almost infinite importance. 

Jesus never treated human life as if it were neg- 
ligible. He taught us that as the one lost coin is 
valuable to the woman who still has nine, and as 



150 Blue Stars and Gold 

the one lost sheep counts with the shepherd who 
lacks only that one of having a hundred, so we 
count with God. There is a literal translation of 
a sweet verse in Peter's epistle, "Casting all your 
care upon Him, for it matters to Him about you." 
It matters to God ! The Incarnation says so. The 
whole Gospel story says so. 

What is the world for? It is the divine labora- 
tory in which the academic formulae of heaven 
are tested in the real stuff of human character. It 
is the divine experiment station in which the 
theories of God are wrought out in actual experi- 
ence. It is the theater in which the divine Word 
ceases to be merely literary and becomes flesh — 
the flesh of Jesus, the flesh of righteous manhood 
and womanhood. It is the place where God makes 
real his principles; where righteousness ceases to 
be a mere law and becomes a life; where God can 
test his own patience, kindness, gentleness, long- 
suffering and forgiveness — where even God can 
build up his consciousness in objective relations, 
and do as well as know. 

The final interests of God and man are identical. 
I protest against the assumption that in the trial 
and resurrection of Jesus, God and man stand rep- 
resenting eternally opposite interests. If the cross 
were humanity's final verdict of Jesus, then God 
would be equally responsible with man for the fate 
of goodness in the world. And if, Jesus having 



God Is Marching On 151 

been slain by men, God were to reverse the decree 
in the supreme court of heaven, thereby over- 
whelming men with condemnation, still it would be 
a failure of the program of Jesus whom God sent 
not to condemn the world, but that the world 
through him might be saved. Here on this very 
earth which Jesus trod, Jesus is to be proclaimed 
Lord and king, and that by the free and sovereign 
choice of men. God and man are at one in the 
hazard and in the glory of the achievement. 

The question with the father seeking a lost child 
is not whether it is a large child or a small child, 
nor even whether it is a good child or bad child. 
He seeks the child because it is his own. We are 
of worth to God. 

But we can do things that really count. God 
needs us. He has work which depends on our 
doing; the world will lack something if we do not 
do it. Something will be added if we do it. We 
are of value to God. 

The conviction that God is marking progress 
through our present sacrifices is strong in the hearts 
of the men at the front. This is the thought that 
underlies the charming poem, "In Flanders' 
Fields," by the late Lieut. Col. John McCrae of 
the Canadian Army: 

In Flanders' Fields the poppies grow- 
Between the crosses, row on row, 



152 Blue Stars and Gold 

That mark our place, and in the sky 
The larks still bravely singing fly, 
Scarce heard amid the guns below. 
We are the dead. Short days ago 
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 
Loved and were loved, and now we lie 
In Flanders' Fields. 

Take up our quarrel with the foe ; 
To you from falling hands we throw 
The Torch — be yours to hold it high; 
If ye break faith with us who die, 
We shall not sleep though poppies grow 
In Flanders' Fields, 



THE TRAJECTORY OF OUR 
PRAYERS 

The long range gun with which the Germans 
bombarded Paris added shame to a nation that 
already has guilt enough upon its soul. 

They chose Good Friday as the day on which 
to train the new gun upon that city. That was 
the day of all days when people were likely to be 
at church, and when, if any public building con- 
taining many people was struck, it was likely to be 
a church, with worshipping women and children 
present in large proportion. 

And that was where they did their largest execu- 
tion, among women and children, kneeling before 
the altar of God, commemorating the Passion of 
their Lord. 

On that day was Christ crucified afresh in their 
wanton murder before the altar of their faith. 

But how were they able to make a shot carry 
so far? 

Partly by means of a gun that could carry a 
heavy charge, a shell skillfully and accurately de- 

153 



154 Blue Stars and Gold 

signed, and partly by the high elevation of the 
long gun's muzzle. 

I have seen a drawing of the course of that 
shell, as it would need to rise in order to fly so far, 
and it was higher than the Alps and the Andes and 
the Pyrenees and the Rocky Mountains, all piled 
on top of each other. The highest mountain in 
all those ranges might have been taken, and one 
from the Himalayas placed on top, and the shell 
would have gone over the crest of them all. 

Long range artillery requires a high curved 
trajectory. 

So do long range prayers. 

God is no farther away from our boys than 
when they were at home, and He is no farther 
away from us. 

A three cent postage stamp will take a letter to 
them as cheaply as though they were living in the 
next town, and a prayer will go to them as swiftly. 

Our measures of distance mean nothing to God. 

But they mean much to our mind and limited 
vision. 

We need to pray, not more loudly, not with 
more spiritual strain upon the vocal cords of faith, 
but with more spiritual elevation. 

It is harder to conceive of God as relating Him- 
self to our loved ones and ourselves amid such 
conditions as we now for the first time experience. 

But it can be done, and daily is done. 



The Trajectory of Our Prayers 155 

Only let not our prayers be adjusted to a too flat 
trajectory. 

It is not a question of what God can do, but 
what God can do through us. 

If God is to use our prayers for the spiritual 
welfare of our loved ones, we shall need to cul- 
tivate the habit of a prayer that has in it more 
faith than we have sometimes employed. 

We shall do well if we learn that the shortest 
line between us and our boys across the sea, is 
by way of heaven. 

Our boys are some of them forgetting to pray, 
perhaps. But others are learning it, and they are 
praying more deeply and earnestly than ever be- 
fore. Deep are the experiences through which 
they must pass, and their eyes will have seen won- 
derful and terrible things in heaven and earth ere 
they come back to us. It is for us to be ready to 
interpret their experiences in terms of living truth. 



Face to Face With Reality 
By John Oxenham 

What did you see out there, my lad, 
That has set that look in your eyes? 

You went out a boy, you have come back a man, 
With strange new depths underneath your tan ; 

What was it you saw out there, my lad, 
That has set such deeps in your eyes? 

"Strange things, and sad, and wonderful — 

Things that I scarce can tell; 
I have been in the sweep of the Reaper's scythe, 

With God, and Christ, and hell. 

"I have seen Christ doing Christly deeds; 

I have seen the devil at play; 
I have gripped to the sod in the hand of God, 

I have seen the godless pray. 

"I have seen Death blast out suddenly 

From a clear blue summer sky; 
I have slain like Cain with a blazing brain, 

I have heard the wounded cry. 
156 



Face to Face with Reality 157 

"I have lain alone among the dead, 

With no hope but to die; 
I have seen them killing the wounded ones, 

I have seen them crucify. 

"I have seen the devil in petticoats 

Wiling the souls of men; 
I have seen great sinners do great deeds, 

And turn to their sins again. 

"I have sped through hells of fiery hail, 

With fell red-fury shod; 
I have heard the whisper of a voice, 

I have looked in the face of God." 

You've a right to your deep, high look, my lad. 

You have met God in the ways, 
And no man looks into His face 

But he feels it all his days. 
You've a right to your deep, high look, my lad, 

And we thank Him for his grace. 



WHEN THE SHIP GOES DOWN 

In former wars, the Navy was largely recruited 
from the coast. Now it finds a large proportion 
of its men in the states that are distant from salt 
water. 

In earlier days we had a fleet of fishing vessels 
manned by the boys of Maine and Massachusetts, 
and another fleet of clipper ships whose white 
wings wafted our cargoes to the farthest markets 
of the world. In time of war, the American sea- 
men on these ships became our sailors in the Navy. 
But now we go inland for a very large part of our 
naval fighters. 

Hence it comes about that the ocean has sud- 
denly become a grim reality to many thousands of 
homes to which hitherto it has seemed very re- 
mote. 

In hundreds of churches they now sing, where 
they did not formerly sing, — 

Eternal Father! strong to save, 
Whose arm doth bind the restless wave, 
158 



When the Ship Goes Down 159 

Who bidst the mighty ocean deep 
Its own appointed limits keep: 
Oh, hear us when we cry to thee 
For those in peril on the sea. 



As yet there have been no great naval battles. 
The fighting has largely been done by that assassin 
of the ocean, the cowardly submarine. 

But there will be battles, and there are already 
perils. 

What is to become of our faith when the ship 
goes down on which our loved ones sail? 

The sinking of the "Titanic" stopped the beat- 
ing of the world's heart for a minute of awful 
agony in realization of man's helplessness in com- 
petition with the resistless power of nature. The 
sinking of the "Lusitania" pierced the world's 
heart with a pain like that of a stab of a knife in 
a human hand. There is one thing more terrible 
than the remorseless power of nature, and that is 
the wrath of man. Humanity's hopes have suf- 
fered an awful shipwreck, nor do we see any im- 
mediate prospect that the war will end and the 
world return to a recognition of sane leadership. 
We have had a sad disillusionment; we are not 
nearly so civilized as we thought we were. Civili- 
zation has come perilously near to pulling down 
its ensign and hoisting the black flag with sk'ili 
and crossbones at its mast-head. 



160 Blue Stars and Gold 

I want to say a few words to the people whose 
faith has suffered shipwreck; to the people who 
once believed things which now they doubt; to the 
men who are not strong enough to cast themselves 
into the freezing and wind-tossed ocean and swim 
ashore in the strength of their own personal faith. 
At the time of Paul's shipwreck, those who could 
not swim escaped on planks and broken pieces of 
the ship; there still are such men. It is to them 
I want to say a word. I want to give them some 
planks of what seems to me great elemental truth, 
then some broken spars saved out of the wreckage 
of their faith. 

There are some planks, some great fundamental 
assumptions on the basis of which we must face 
our life problems. The first of these is the eternal 
value of the right. I start with that because it is 
the nearest plank to hand when the ship goes down. 
If God were dead and the world were bad, it still 
would be better for every right-minded man to live 
righteously with his neighbor and reverently to- 
ward the good. If all that we have hoped for is 
a delusion, it still is better to hold to the right on 
the sheer basis of its value in human life. 

There is a second plank which I think every 
one of us may lay hold upon, and that is the 
imperative of personal obligation. There is some- 
thing I ought to do, and I shall stand forever con- 
demned before my own conscience if I do not do 



When the Ship Goes Down 161 

my best. If I could know that there were no God, 
or that there were a God and He was either wicked 
or indifferent, that fact could never justify me in 
defrauding my neighbor or seeking his harm. I 
have my own duty to perform and must do it, 
though the heavens fall. 

I find another plank in the personal influence of 
Jesus Christ. I am not speaking now of any theory 
about Him. Whether He represents God's long- 
est reach manward, or man's highest aspiration 
Godward, we will not now discuss. He is a fact 
to be reckoned with in the time of moral ship- 
wreck. He lived in such a time, a time when the 
church was recreant and government had become 
corrupt; in a time when the most favored nation 
in the world denied its Lord, and the laws of the 
greatest of existing governments were perverted 
to procure His crucifixion. In such a time Jesus 
lived. The destruction of Jerusalem was near. 
The utter collapse of the Old Testament ideals 
of righteousness was imminent, yet He maintained 
His faith in God. and man and gave to the world 
a new saving element of hope. I am not now 
speaking of Him in terms of any man's theology; 
I am merely saying that in the day of moral ship- 
wreck the thoughtful man may well reckon with 
Jesus Christ, for He lived in such a time and 
guided the world's ship through foaming seas to a 
sure harbor of hope. 



162 Blue Stars and Gold 

I take these three planks of righteousness and 
duty and the character of Jesus Christ, and to them 
I add one more — faith in an overruling Good- 
ness. Bad as things are, there is always goodness 
somewhere. It must be a very persistent kind of 
goodness, too, or it would have been drowned long 
ago. It is a goodness that floats; you can never 
quite submerge it and keep it down. Indeed, I 
think we shall agree in calling it Eternal Good- 
ness. It is a goodness that inheres in the heart 
of things. You may call it what you like; we will 
not quarrel about names, but I call it the goodness 
of God. "I had fainted unless I had believed to 
behold the goodness of the Lord in the land of the 
living." 

I will add one other broken piece of the ship, 
and that is hope for the life to come. Perhaps you 
will tell me that you have lost that article out of 
your creed. I am not asking you to put it into 
your creed as something you feel sure about. I 
am assuming, however, that you still cherish the 
hope that the loved ones you have lost are safe 
somewhere in the love of God, and that you want 
to live so that if they are living in any heaven any- 
where, they are not lost to you. 

Now, I believe that if worst came to worst, a 
man might cling to any one of these great funda- 
mental truths, to any one of these broken pieces 
of his former faith, and ultimately come ashore. 



When the Ship Goes Down 163 

But If you hold to any two of them, or three, or 
four, or half a dozen of such truths, you can lash 
them together and make a raft, and even though 
the proud waters go over your soul, you can never 
quite be overwhelmed. 



THE VALUE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF 
LIFE 

In the same home where Jesus lived when He 
was a lad, lived James, His brother, and the two 
played together. They must have been very unlike 
in many ways, for the letter that James has left 
to us exhibits few of the traits of mind that we 
discover in Jesus. Still, there are points of simi- 
larity. James was called "the just." He left be- 
hind him a record of rectitude which holds his 
name in high honor always. 

This man James was writing about the brevity of 
life, and he said: "What is your life? It is even 
a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then 
vanishethaway." 

Very well, but what is a vapor, and when it van- 
ishes, what becomes of it? 

We hardly need to be reminded of the brevity 
of life. 

It is the universal testimony of old men that 
to them life has seemed short. Even a life of 

164 



The Value and Significance of Life 165 

threescore years and ten is a restricted life, and if, 
by reason of strength, the years be fourscore, yet 
life is soon cut off. 

All of our plans are made with the knowledge 
that we may not live to carry them out. We press 
through the world with a feverish haste as those 
who are not to be here long. 

The Apostle James was speaking well within 
bounds when he compared life to vapor. Meas- 
ured in the proportion of its length to the bound- 
less extent of time, the life of any one man is too 
brief to be represented by a vapor; measured by 
the proportion of his bulk to the mass of the uni- 
verse he is altogether too insignificant to be thought 
of even as the tiniest speck in a vapor. 

If the man of science be asked concerning human 
life in its relation either to the stretch of time or 
the bulk of the universe, he would say what James 
said, and say it more emphatically. 

What is our world, and what is man? In an 
issue of The Independent, Harry H. Kemp has 
answered this question. 

God made a million atoms, each by mortals called a 

"world;" 
Like dust-motes in a beam of light, they darted, circled, 

whirled ; 
Yet all these million worlds, compared to all His might 

did rule, 
Were in the Universal Whole one tiny molecule. 



166 Blue Stars and Gold 

The mortals on these shining specks spake of God's space 

as "far," 
And every bright companion-mote they hailed as "world" 

or "star." 
(They should have known the Eternal Mind no need for 

measures hath; 
God looketh down the Milky Way as down a garden 

path; 
The distance from our outmost sun unto His throne, no 

doubt, 
Is a hand's-breadth in His seeing, or too small to measure 

out.) 

These manikins then fought and died on many a shining 

mote — 
For what they dubbed as "empires," sworded one another's 

throat ; 
Each nation on its ant-hill swarmed and sang a patriot 

song, 
And stormed another ant-hill to avenge an emmet wrong; 
And thus they hated, loved and lived until the end of 

time, 
While up the weary rounds of life a million worlds did 

climb. 

Then flash ! Two molecules collide and worlds exhale in 

mist, 
And back into a fiery ring do melted empires twist, 
And cities in solution hang and drop in fiery rain, 
And the sinew of the tiger fuses with the poet's brain ; 



The Value and Significance of Life 167 

All back into one element, trees, mountains, oceans, glide, 
And not one life is left to strut and swell in pompous 

pride — 
Then some far-worlded telescope which chance did thither 

turn 
Beholds this starry funeral pyre minutely flame and burn, 
"Lo!" thinks the awed astronomer, his star-map at his 

side, 
"Upon yon utmost verge of night a star was born and 

died." 
And so they numbered eons there, and cherished histories 

gray ! 
Oh, but they battled, loved and dreamed for a clock-tick 

in God's day ! 

Life is a vapor. But what is a vapor? It is all 
that it ever has been. It was a pearly raindrop 
that fell down from the skies; and as it fell, it 
brightened and made beautiful the flower in whose 
golden heart it lay, and then, dropping to the earth, 
watered the root that there might be other flowers; 
and then, by subterranean channels breaking forth 
into a spring, it flowed singing to the sea, turning 
the wheels of industry as it went, and laughing in 
the sunlight as it bore great ships upon its blue 
bosom. 

The sun caught it up and it vanished into heaven, 
smiling as it rose. All this the vapor was and is; 
all this it did and does. It appeareth for a little 
while and then vanisheth away. 



168 Blue Stars and Gold 

But when it vanishes, it rises fragrant with the 
odor of the flowers it has refreshed, radiant with 
the honor of thirst it has quenched, and jubilant in 
the memories of service it has rendered. 

It vanishes away, but as it vanishes, the sun 
catches it up into heaven, pours through it the sev- 
enfold glory of its prismatic splendor, and imparts 
to it a radiance fit for the diadem of God. 

It vanishes away, but as it vanishes, it smiles 
in the glow of promise of joyful service still to 
-be, and its rainbow gladdens the eyes of men. 

There are lives like that. They app-ear for a lit- 
tle time and then vanish away. But they come to 
earth trailing clouds of glory, and they vanish fra- 
grant with the memories of a beautiful and varied 
ministry to their fellow men. 

They flow through the channel of their years, 
leave behind them holy and sacred memorials, and 
when they vanish they overarch the two worlds; 
at this end are glorious memories, and the gold at 
the other end of their rainbow is the pavement of 
the city of God. 

And the vapor is not lost. It is one of the cer- 
tainties of modern science that every particle of 
the vapor abides. It disappears, but it is inde- 
structible. We see it, 

Like the snowdrop in the river, 
A moment white, then fades forever. 



Value and Significance of Life 169 

Forever? No! It has fallen, faded, risen and 
blessed the world a million times; and unborn gen- 
erations will see it, taste it, and be refeshed by it. 

There are lives like that. They come to earth, 
live, love and pass away. But they are not lost. 
The sweet influences by which they made life bet- 
ter are added to the invisible cords that bind the 
world to the throne of God. They are not lost. 
They live, and live forever. 



MAKING DEATH SIGNIFICANT 

Death is an event which every man must face 
as a certain experience of his own. 

It is the great leveler. It is like the flood of 
Noah's day; there is no man tall enough to rise 
above it. 

For the vast majority of mankind death has no 
especial significance. 

For very many it is a very stupid and common- 
place event. They simply lie down and stop breath- 
ing. They may be longer about it, or less long; 
they may groan or lie quiet; but they die, and that 
is virtually all that is to be said about it. 

But here and there is a man who makes death 
significant. 

Some do it one way and some in another. 

Abner died as the fool dieth. 

Others have done likewise. 

In that fashion they wrenched death from the 
commonplace and flung life away to the accom- 
paniment of folly. 

170 



Making Death Significant 171 

But other people have succeeded in dying nobly, 
immortally. 

It is not wholly the manner of their death. Je- 
sus and the two robbers had an identical experi- 
ence so far as the crucifixion went; but His Cross 
was not like theirs. 

In some way Jesus was able to meet death in a 
way that robbed that great enemy of his victory. 

Jesus made death significant. 

It is the glory of the soldier who fights for a 
great cause, that he is able to utilize an experience 
which he must share with all sorts and conditions 
of men from Adam down, and even with the brute 
creation, and make it significant. 

Some men have said that if Jesus Christ had 
lived the life He lived, and taught the truths He 
taught, and died a natural death, it would have 
meant as much to the world. 

They talked nonsense. 

If Jesus had lived as He lived, his life would 
have been unspeakably precious. If He had taught 
as He taught, the truths He uttered would have 
been among the best heritages of mankind. But 
his life and his teachings take on a dignity and 
spiritual significance with His death which the 
great teachers from the apostles down have rightly 
evaluated. 

Death may be a very significant event. 



172 Blue Stars and Gold 

It is easy to die ; men have died for a wish or a whim, 
For bravado, passion or pride. 

Yes, that is true. 

Some deaths have been inconsequential. 

Some might as well have occurred years before 
they did, and the world would have been, if any- 
thing, better off. 

Some deaths have been wasteful and some have 
been shameful. But some have been noble, and 
have inspired later generations as lives alone could 
never have inspired them. 

A short time ago The Atlantic Monthly con- 
tained an article by Winifred Kirkland, entitled 
"The New Death." It was much discussed, but 
hardly deserved all the attention that was given 
it. There is no "new death." All the ways 
of dying have been tried out long ago. But the 
article, if not great, was timely, and much of it 
was true, including this — that the issues of the war 
are certain to make death more real to us, and 
the other life more significant. We shall no longer 
ignore death, or assume that our friends once dead 
are gone out of our life and experience. The 
author of the article to which I refer speaks her 
best words in her closing paragraphs: 

As the new intimacy with death frees us from the 
fear of our own dissolution, transmuting dread into 
the stimulus of hope, so the New Death provides 



Making Death Significant 173 

that adaptation of love to loss which transmutes 
bereavement into energy. Four years ago the activ- 
ity of the world was conditioned on our power to 
forget death. Our dead lay coffined in our hearts. 
We hesitated to speak of them, as we should have 
hesitated to ask our friends to go with us to a grave 
— a visit that for ourselves was either a duty or a 
solace, but might have hurt the sensibilities of others. 
Such conduct was to shun death, not to accept it. 
It was not death that killed our loved ones, it was 
our manner of concealing grief, as if it were a thing 
unclean and painful, abnormal as disease. To-day 
brave grief is a sign of the soul's health. 

We used to hide away our loved ones from our 
conversation, denying them that earthly influence 
which is one branch of their bourgeoning. To-day, 
when millions of mothers grieve, it would be trav- 
esty to pretend that their lost sons are not their fore- 
most thought. We cannot hide away so many dead. 
Their presence must enter our daily talk, must min- 
gle with our daily tasks. At last we no longer con- 
demn our dead to graves in a past that we keep pri- 
vate, but allow them their rightful place in our 
present 

If our faith is to lead us where our dead boys 
have gone, it must be a faith built, like theirs, of 
spirit-values. On the mere guess that death is a 
portal is founded the resilience of the hell-rocked . 
world to-day. It is a new illumination, a New 
Death, when dying can be the greatest inspiration of 
our everyday energy, the strongest impulse toward 



174 Blue Stars and Gold 

daily joy. If only the beauty of the vision the trag- 
edy has revealed can be retained a little while ! For 
this little while has death come into its own as the 
great enhancer and enricher of life. 

This is the lesson that the slain splendor of youth 
has taught to a moribund world. To construct a 
new world on the faith that their words and their 
sacrifice attest is the sole expression permitted to our 
mourning; it is the sole monument beautiful enough 
to be their memorial. 

Our boys who have gone to their death have not 
gone whining nor in a craven spirit. They have 
gone with the abandon of which Alan Seeger 
wrote : 

I have a rendezvous with Death 
On some scarred slope of battered hill, 
When spring comes round again this year 
And the first meadow flowers appear, 
And I to my pledged word am true — 
I shall not fail that rendezvous. 

They have gone with the solemn gaiety of which 
Winifred M. Letts wrote in describing the de- 
parture of the Oxford boys: 

I saw the spires of Oxford 

As I was passing by, 
The gray spires of Oxford 

Against a pearl-gray sky. 



Making Death Significant 175 

My heart was with the Oxford men 
Who went abroad to die. 

The years go fast in Oxford, 

The golden years and gay. 
The hoary colleges look down 

On careless boys at play. 
But when the bugle sounded war 

They put their games away. 

They left the peaceful river, 

The cricket-field, the quad, 
The shaven lawns of Oxford 

To seek a bloody sod — 
They gave their merry youth away 

For country and for God. 

God rest you, happy gentlemen, 

Who laid your good lives down, 
Who took the khaki and the gun 

Instead of cap and gown. 
God bring you to a fairer place 

Than even Oxford town. 



"SOMEWHERE" 

I was at Camp Grant a few months after it 
opened, giving a series of addresses to the soldier 
boys in training there. The boys were singing 
songs new and old. The piano played one that 
was new to us all. 

"Now, fellows," said the leader, "this new song 
is a corker. Let's learn it, and sing it with pep !" 

So they started the song, which began, I think, 
somewhat flippantly, "Johnny, get your gun" — a 
line neither very dignified nor original — and in due 
time they swung into the chorus and were singing, 
"Over there, Over there !" 

I was familiar with those words in a Gospel 
hymn, and, I thought, to quite as good a tune, — 

O think of the home over there, 

By the side of the river of light, 
Where the saints all immortal and fair, 
Are clad in their garments of white. 
Over there ! Over there ! 
O think of the home over there ! 
176 



"Somewhere" 177 

But it was not this song which the boys sang at 
Camp Grant and which I have heard so often since. 
The "Over There" of which they sing is over in 
France : 

We'll be over, we're coming over, 

And we won't come back till it's over, over there. 

It is interesting to notice how quickly "Over 
There" has become accepted as a geographical des- 
ignation. Everybody now talks about "Over 
There," and everybody understands it. 

There is another new place charted and named 
in the geography of the soul of America, and that 
is "Somewhere." 

Sentimental young women used to sing: 

I am for one and there's one for me, 

Somewhere, somewhere; 
Whisper, ye breezes, o'er land or sea, 
And tell him I love him where'er he be, 
Oh, tell him I'm waiting for him alone, 

Somewhere, somewhere! 

Sensible people used to smile at songs like these ; 
they were for those who sang them, but not for us. 

Now and then at a funeral would be sung, 
"Beautiful Isle of Somewhere," and always, after- 
ward, some one would comment on it as cheap sen- 
timent and poor verse. 



178 Blue Stars and Gold 

The verse was not so poor ; it could not be called 
great, but it was better both in form and sentiment 
than some of its critics gave it credit for being. 

Somewhere the sun is shining, 

Somewhere the songbirds dwell; 
Cease, then, thy sad repining, 

God lives, and all is well! 
Somewhere, Somewhere! 

Beautiful Isle of Somewhere! 
Land of the true, where we live anew, 

Beautiful Isle of Somewhere! 

As poetry, it certainly might have been either 
better or worse, and as sentiment, it was not very 
extravagant. Yet in the very sensible and stupid 
days before the war, such songs were frowned 
upon by apostles of the commonplace. 

But now ! 

Every one of us has received letters "Passed by 
the Censor." 

Where from? 

From "Somewhere." 

"Somewhere in France." 

Not very definite, is it ? But as definite as, under 
the circumstances, is advisable. 

Yes, and very satisfactory. 

To know that our boys are "somewhere," well 
cared for, happy and useful, is real satisfaction. 



"Somewhere" 179 

I have a long shelf of red-bound books edited 
and published by Karl Baedeker. I have carried 
them in satchel and in pocket through many lands. 
They are all out of date now, and after the war 
some one else will publish them for Americans and 
Frenchmen and Englishmen. We shall not be con- 
tent with guide books made in Germany. 

The editors of the new guide books that are to 
be published after the war may not name that place 
in their index, but it is the most important place in 
Europe to-day — that vague, but very real place, 
Somewhere: 

To-night my boy is over the sea, 

Somewhere, somewhere ; 
Up in the firing-line is he, 

Somewhere, somewhere : 
But I have a hand, the hand of prayer, 
That can reach across and touch him there, 
And set him within God's loving care, 

Somewhere, somewhere. 

Over the sea is the mother's boy, 

Somewhere, somewhere; 
Over the seas is the father's joy, 

Somewhere, somewhere: 
And with the morning's dawning light, 
Over the top, and into the fight, 
My boy will go with the Christ in white, 

Somewhere, somewhere. 



180 Blue Stars and Gold 

My boy has gone with the khaki men, 

Somewhere, somewhere ; 
He is clearing out the Bodies' den, 

Somewhere, somewhere ; 
With a soul that knows no hate nor fear, 
He fights for a sacred cause, and dear — 
And yet I think that his heart is here, 

Somewhere, somewhere. 

SOMEWHERE 

by Henry Burton. 

And if to us sensible and unsentimental people, 
who have managed to make ourselves so common- 
place and are so proud of it, can come experiences 
that make it possible for us to sing with fervor of 
earthly places which we designate as "Over There" 
and "Somewhere," why may we not with good 
reason do the same in that realm of spiritual geog- 
raphy where our souls are at home ? 

As our loved ones beyond the seas are not lost 
to us, but are "Somewhere," and are doing their 
duty "Over There," so are those not lost whom 
God hath taken on a longer journey. 

I am nearing the end of this book. I shall finish 
it to-night, for I write in a quiet place, my summer 
study in the woods, beside a little lake in Eastern 
Massachusetts, where for twenty summers I have 
worked. 

I can work rapidly here, for I am free from the 
ceaseless interruptions that hinder my labor in Chi- 



"Somewhere" 181 

cago. Here I hardly ever have a telephone call. 
There is a telephone, to be sure, in the house, some 
distance away, and once or twice a week I am called 
there. The village printer tells me that the 
envelopes which I ordered will be ready to-mor- 
row, or the tailor informs me that the coat which 
he is repairing is ready. Their voices come to me 
clear and distinct from the village a mile away. 

I had a call this morning. It took the operator 
a little longer than usual to make connections, but 
when that was done, it was no different from any 
call. 

A lady who lived in Chicago and whom I know 
well spoke to me, and said, "Mother died this 
morning. Can you attend the funeral in Chicago 
on Tuesday?" 

I consider a moment my engagements for to- 
morrow ; I am to preach in Providence in the morn- 
ing, and in another place in the evening. From 
there I can get either to Boston or New York; yes, 
I can go. 

"And where are you ?" I ask her. 

She might have been in Boston, twenty-five miles 
away, or in Chicago, a thousand miles away. 

She told me that she was visiting in Pennsyl- 
vania, and her mother died in Chicago; she had 
just learned of it by telegraph, and she and her 
sisters were arranging for the funeral by wire, for 
they were widely separated. 



182 Blue Stars and Gold 

She told me the name of the town in Pennsyl- 
vania from which she was speaking, but I did not 
get it. It might have been Philadelphia, or Pitts- 
burgh, or any of the other cities; it was not im- 
portant that I should know the place, and toll rates 
are high, so I did not ask her again. 

I am gathering up the sheets of this book to take 
with me to the publishers, for I am starting on a 
journey of a thousand miles in response to a voice 
from "somewhere in Pennsylvania." 

It might seem a very foolish thing to do, but it 
is not. 

I shall find her in Chicago when I arrive there, 
and I shall stand with her and her sisters and speak 
the words of comfort and hope. 

And as for the dear old mother, who had lived 
past her four score years, and died rich in love and 
honor, where is she? 

She also is "somewhere." If the voice of her 
daughter can come to me from somewhere in Penn- 
sylvania, and I can hear it as plainly as if she called 
to me from the next room, I will not deny that her 
mother, who also is out of my sight, can still be an 
influence, a living influence, in the lives of all who 
loved her. She is no farther away than her 
daughter, with whom I have been speaking from 
the telephone in my own cottage in Massachusetts 
to somewhere in Pennsylvania. 

So after the services of the Sabbath are over, I 



"Somewhere" 183 

shall take up my journey of a thousand miles in 
response to a voice from somewhere. 

But I know the voice, and I know whither I go. 

We go through life following voices that speak 
to us from somewhere beyond our sight. The 
voices of the poets and the prophets and the singers 
of sweet melodies reverberate in our own souls; 
the messages and memories of our beloved dead 
still are audible and articulate to the ear of love. 
We follow those voices from "somewhere," 

And nightly pitch our moving tent 
A day's march nearer home. 



THE WAYSIDE INNS OF HEAVEN 

There are several references in the Gospels 
which throw some light on the conception which 
Jesus held of heaven. Jesus had just been visiting 
the Temple of Jerusalem, and He was sitting near 
it with his disciples when He said to them, "In my 
Father's house are many mansions." 

The use of the word "mansions" here is very 
interesting. Where this word is used in the New 
Testament, it invariably refers not to what we 
term mansions, but to lodging places, and suggests 
a degree of privacy belonging to heaven not em- 
phasized in the popular conception of what that 
place may be. 

In such references as these there is an incidental 
but fairly clear indication of one of the conditions 
of heaven. So far as this text gives us any light 
at all, its suggestion is that of progress. When 
we get to heaven, we shall not settle down in ever- 
lasting stagnation; we shall move on. 

184 



The Wayside Inns of Heaven 185 

We shall move on in knowledge. These minds 
of ours are not constructed for a sudden and ex- 
plosive expansion, either on earth or in heaven. 
The soul itself is not a physical entity; it is our 
capacity for development. We struggle through 
this world with painfully little knowledge, but nor- 
mal life never loses its capacity for growth and its 
eagerness to grow. 

We shall grow in knowledge in heaven, and that 
normally, as Jesus on earth grew in wisdom while 
He grew in stature. 

We shall move on in our capacity for mutual 
helpfulness. We shall grow in goodness. People 
sometimes assume that the instant we get to heaven 
every fault we have will be miraculously eradicated. 
I do not know how anybody can know this to 
be true. It seems to be the plan of God that we 
shall be permitted to make a good many blunders 
here on earth in order that we shall learn by our mis- 
takes. I know no reason why we should suppose 
that God will instantly and violently abrogate that 
method. I have heard people say that if the high- 
est archangel in glory should commit one slightest 
sin, that single violation of God's law would cast 
him instantly down to hell. Nobody knows that, 
and I do not believe it. I think that God who is so 
patient with us here can afford to be, and will be, 
patient with us while we slowly but surely learn bet- 
ter. I know a good many people who are not going 



186 Blue Stars and Gold 

to be comfortable companions for anybody to live 
with in heaven until they have been there two or 
three thousand years. They are good people, but 
so far as I can judge, it will take them at least that 
length of time spent in rather industrious effort to 
get to be as good as saints ought to be on earth. 

Jesus uses the same word where he says that 
He and the Father will make their abode with 
those who love God. That is a very precious 
promise, the beginning of which is now and the end 
of which stretches to the farther side of eternity. 
In heaven we shall be moving on, but we shall 
always have companionship. The golden streets 
have other traffic than the celestial moving vans. 
We move on, but our Heavenly Father and our 
gracious Saviour move on with us. 

It is a satisfaction thus to be assured that in 
the next world, as in this, "Our God goes march- 
ing on." 

Progress does not halt either on God's part 
or ours. This urge in the blood of normal human 
life is not wholly a manifestation of our human 
restlessness; it is a manifestation of something in 
the heart of God that, from the days of Israel's 
wanderings in the wilderness on through the 
triumphal progress of heaven, keeps God and us 
forever moving. The homing instinct of the soul 
that drives us Godward is no more a normal part 
of our nature than the adventurous push within us, 



The Wayside Inns of Heaven 187 

spurring us ever on to catch the rhythm of the 
Divine music and keep step with God. 

A good many years ago I had a visit by the road- 
side with an unlettered preacher in the Kentucky 
mountains. It was a hot day, and we stopped to 
water our horses where we crossed a stream, and 
then dismounted and sat for a little while upon the 
bank. He first tried to interest me in a horse trade, 
and then proceeded to tell me of an illness which 
he had experienced seven years before, which pro- 
duced a remarkable change in him. It was typhoid 
fever, and for several weeks he was in delirium. 
He told me that as a result of that sickness he 
found himself able for the first time in his life to 
read the Bible. He had attended school but a few 
weeks in his childhood, and learned a small num- 
ber of words out of Webster's blue-backed spelling 
book according to the method of instruction then in 
vogue in the mountain schools. But he never had 
put words together until after his sickness, when, 
to his delight, he found himself able to read the 
Bible. He did not pretend to have become very 
efficient at it, but by spelling out some words and 
skipping the hardest ones, he had the indescribable 
joy of being able to read his Bible. I do not doubt 
the truth of what he told me, and his case is not 
without parallel in the records of psychology. 

But he also told me that he died. He was con- 
scious all the time while his friends gathered about 



188 Blue Stars and Gold 

him and prepared his body for burial. He heard 
what they said, and knew what they were doing, 
and could see his body and knew that it was no 
longer his, and it was a sorrow to him when finally 
he had to re-inhabit it and make those involuntary 
manifestations of life which caused his friends to 
desist from their preparations for his burial. The 
doctor called it by some name he did not know and 
insisted that he never really had been dead, but 
he knew better. People said he was crazy when 
he told them about it, but he knew that he was per- 
fectly sane and was describing his actual experience. 

He went to heaven, so he said, and to his great 
surprise, was not immediately ushered into the 
presence of all its joys; indeed, he never got very 
far in. He was just in the first room, which was 
more beautiful than any he had ever seen. It was 
ceiled with planed lumber and painted a dove color, 
and around him were beauties indescribable, but on 
the farther side was an unglazed window at a height 
where those in the first room could see through, and 
the next room was as much more beautiful than the 
first as the first room was than anything he had 
ever seen on earth. But even this was not the end, 
for he could see a similar window in the farther 
partition of the second room, and had a suggestion 
of others in the rooms that were still beyond. 

He said, "They call me crazy and say the fever 
turned my head, but I know what I seen and it's 



The Wayside Inns of Heaven 189 

so. You stay in the first room a thousand years 
and think it's only a day, for a thousand years are 
as a day with the Lord, and it takes you that long 
to see all there is to see and learn all there is to 
learn in that first room. And it takes you longer 
in the next one, for it's more beautiful than the 
first. And you never can get tired of it, for you are 
always learning something you didn't know and 
seeing something more beautiful than you have 
ever dreamed. And so you go on and on, room 
after room, and room after room, always learning, 
always finding out something, always increasing in 
your power to enjoy more beautiful things, and you 
never get to the last one, for it's worlds without 
end. Amen." 

That the old man's mind had been affected by his 
illness, I have no doubt. That he was mistaken as 
to his having been dead, I am very confident. That 
his sickness, which had quickened some of his fac- 
ulties, had injured others, was plain enough. But 
in his main contention the old man was not crazy. 
Heaven is not a place of monotonous and static 
goodness. Heaven is a place of new experiences, 
new knowledge, new goodness, new service. 



DO YOU BELIEVE IN IMMORTALITY? 

I believe in the immortality of the soul. I can- 
not prove it, but I cherish the hope. I have two 
principal reasons. The first is the goodness of 
God, and the other is the worth of character. There 
are other reasons, but these stand first. 

There is no adventure so thrilling and hazardous 
as that of the soul in its quest of truth. The quest 
lies along no royal highway, straight and plain; it 
lies through regions as trackless as the path to the 
poles, and marked with the tragedies of men who 
have become bewildered, lost their way, and died 
in the wilderness. It is almost a wonder that man- 
kind has not agreed to write "No Thoroughfare" 
at the beginning, and give up the quest. It would 
seem so much easier to take the world at its face 
value, its present cash value, and cease to bother 
about the meaning of things. But the soul of man 
rises to the challenge of the universe, and goes 
forth to find the meaning of things, and at the 
heart of that meaning, an eternal goodness. 

190 



Do You Believe in Immortality? 191 

We are mistaken about so many things related 
to the making and government of the world, it is 
well for us not to be too dogmatic concerning mat- 
ters on which we merely speculate; but it is a sig- 
nificant fact that our faith in immortality is bound 
up with our belief in the divine benevolence. Men 
who do not believe that God is good deny the im- 
mortality of the soul. It would not be true to 
affirm that all men who believe in the goodness of 
God believe in immortality, but it is true that the 
hope of immortality, where it exists, is inseparably 
bound up with the faith that goodness is at the 
heart of things. It is our faith in goodness that 
gives us faith in immortality. It is that same good- 
ness that alone could make immortality worth hav- 
ing. We dare not affirm that life would be a fail- 
ure if it had no continuance beyond the grave, but 
we are fully justified in declaring that life after 
death is a precious corollary of our faith in the 
goodness of God and of the value of life. 

Life might be good, and not continue forever. 
God might be good, and have larger plans than that 
any one man should live eternally. But our hopes 
of life after death are inseparably related to our 
faith that God is good. Men will not believe in im- 
mortality, and in the face of the contradictions of 
life, cannot well believe in immortality, unless they 
first believe in the goodness of God. Not only so, 
but immortality on any other foundation would be 



192 Blue Stars and Gold 

not a blessing but a curse. If God be not good, we 
dare not risk another life if we can avoid it. And 
if God is good, it is not easy for us to imagine how 
that goodness can be compatible with the wasteful 
and reckless destruction of that which has cost 
Him most, and has in it such large possibilities of 
worth to Him. Goodness and immortality stand 
or fall together. And they stand. 

The blossom is not censurable for not being 
fruit; yet it would be a rash blossom that would 
deny its own capacity of growth into fruit. The 
worm is not at fault for not yet being a butterfly. 
But the worm is justly censurable if it denies itself 
whatever luxury and nobility of spirit may be pos- 
sible to it in the contemplation and hope of becom- 
ing a butterfly some time. Whether any such pro- 
phetic premonition can come to a worm, we may 
not know. If into the mean little soul of the worm 
there can enter now any suggestion of what it is 
to be, the most foolish and utterly stupid thing the 
worm could do would be to deny itself the assur- 
ance that one day it should take to itself a form of 
beauty and the power of flight. We can imagine it 
a mirth-provoking experience for the worm to pro- 
claim such an astounding faith. All the testimony 
of the senses would be present to deny it. The 
owl in his wisdom might well be expected to hoot 
at it. There would be no worm present to testify 
that it had ever seen a worm evolve into a butter- 



Do You Believe in Immortality? 193 

fly. Yet if the worm with the aspiring soul were 
a truly wise worm, it would trust its intuitions, its 
inspirations, its faith. It would say, "I intend to be 
just as good a worm as a worm can be, but I am 
more than a worm; I possess the promise and 
potency of becoming a butterfly. Nay, even now, 
in my soul, I am a butterfly." 

We know another thing, namely, that the worm 
that denies to itself the validity of this impulse of 
immortality is forever and hopelessly lost. That is 
to say, the worm that refuses to enter the chrysalis 
gets killed by the frost. The worm that thinks it 
not worth while to bury itself in a dark little place 
of its own spinning, but to live on in its wormhood, 
remains forever a creature of the dust, a thing to 
be trodden on and finally to perish in the cold. It 
is his trust in this matter, which may be called his 
instinct of immortality, that preserves his life at 
all, and preserves it to the coming glory of his 
later and more beautiful existence. 

But there is still a further thought, and that is 
this : The worm that hath this hope in him is not 
wholly a worm. He has in himself the capacity to 
be something greater. The instinct that is to drive 
the worm into the chrysalis must be reckoned with 
in even a scientific study of the worm; it compels 
his classification already with the winged and 
beautiful forms of life. He that believeth hath 
the glorified life. 



194 Blue Stars and Gold 

Let us make it as plain to ourselves as we can 
that this prophetic instinct in the worm that im- 
pels it to weave and enter the chrysalis does more 
than relieve the monotony of wormhood with a 
pleasant illusion of something that the worm does 
not know very much about. It is the thing that 
makes continuous and glorified life attainable, and 
it already makes the worm necessarily classifiable 
as something above a worm. It would be the most 
irrational thing possible for a worm to deny the 
authority and validity of that dim but potent hope. 
And if that would be folly for the worm, how 
much more so for us! By the grace of God, we 
are not worms. We are more than creatures that 
grovel in dust. And one of the things that make 
us so is the compelling power of this blessed hope. 

The hopes that elevate us above the dust, that 
lift up our heads and give wings to our most en- 
nobling and God-like aspirations, these are the 
hopes which we have good right to possess. We 
need not be too economical of them. We cannot 
bankrupt the treasury of God. We cannot exhaust 
the eternal riches which are ours in Jesus Christ. 
Jesus lives, and we have eternal life in Him. 



A Collection of 
PRAYERS AND PRAYER POEMS 

For Readers of This Book 



PRAYERS AND PRAYER POEMS 
For Him I Love 

O God, Thou lovest all men, and I would seek to share 
thy love for all mankind. I pray for all sorts and con- 
ditions of men, for they are all thy children. But Father, 
I cannot love them all alike, nor pray for all alike. I pray 
especially for my own dear one who has gone to fight for 
his Country and his conscience. The Lord watch between 
me and him while we are absent one from the other. Keep 
him in his hours of loneliness and peril. Bring him safe 
home if it be thy will. But whatever sacrifice shall be his 
and mine, make us brave and true. Through thy grace, 
manifest to men in Christ our Lord, Amen. 

For All Our Soldiers, Sailors and Aviators 

God of every righteous cause, we commend to Thee the 
soldiers, sailors and aviators of our great and noble Nation, 
that Thou mayest have them in thy keeping and grant them 
thy blessing. We have sent them forth to fight, as we 
believe, for a great and righteous cause. Thou who didst 
give thy Son to suffer to redeem the world, grant thy 
grace to these the sons of America in this hour of the 
world's crucifixion. Strengthen about them the agencies 
that help them to do right, and rebuke for the sake of 
righteousness all that would diminish our pride in them 
and love for them. God make them brave ; God arm them 
with every manly virtue, and give them victory and peace. 
For the sake of Christ our Lord. Amen. 



198 Blue Stars and Gold 



For Our Country and Our President 

O God, who art the Hope of all the ends of the earth, 
remember the whole creation, pity our race, and save the 
world from sin. Protect our land from whatever threatens 
her welfare, so that religion and virtue may flourish more 
and more. Give the spirit of wisdom and godly fear to 
thy servant, the President of the United States, and all 
who are in authority over us. Give humility to the rich 
and grace to use their riches to thy glory; bless the people 
in their callings and families, and be thou a refuge to the 
poor in their distress. Make every home a shelter from 
temptation and a nursery of noble youth; take also the 
homeless beneath thy protection. Cleanse and sanctify the 
Church which thou hast loved ; and reveal the Spirit of thy 
Son through the life and service of thy people. Enlighten 
all who are perplexed in faith, support those who are 
tempted, awaken those who sleep, comfort the afflicted, and 
encourage such as are ready to faint. Encompass with thy 
favor all whose lives Thou has bound up with our own, 
and, if there be any who do us wrong, remove all bitterness 
from our hearts while we pray for thy blessing upon them. 
Give peace, O Lord, in our time, and unite all hearts in 
the love of thy dear Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



Prayers and Prayer Poems 199 

For Victory 

Almighty God, thou art the God not of this nation 
alone but of all nations. We dare not pray to Thee as if 
thou didst love us alone among the tribes of mankind, nor 
pray to Thee as if we had been sinless and other nations 
wholly corrupt. But we pray for a victory upon our na- 
tional arms. We pray that the armies and navies and 
those who fight in the air for this nation and the nations 
allied with ours may have victory on land and sea. We 
pray this, not because we deserve it, but because we believe 
that we are fighting for a holy cause, for the welfare of all 
nations, and the establishment of justice and peace. Grant 
this, O Lord, our God, not for our sake alone, but for the 
sake of all that is dear to the heart of God. Amen. 



For the Wounded 

Almighty God, we pray Thee for the wounded and the 
sick, especially for those who are near and dear to us. God 
make their bed in sickness, and bless the hands of those who 
minister to them. Bless all agencies which seek to bring 
to wounded men the comfort and the care of loved ones at 
home. Be with those who fight, not under the flag of war, 
but under the banner of the Red Cross. Give them the 
compassion and the courage of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
Grant thy skill to the surgeons and physicians, and bless 
the means used to the recovery of many who are sore hurt. 
Be near to those appointed to die, and grant them a quiet 
ending of their sufferings, and peace with Thee forever- 
more. Amen. 



200 Blue Stars and Gold 

For Our Nation 

Most high and mighty Ruler of the universe, by whom 
our Nation hath been established in freedom and preserved 
in union, we praise thee for thy favor shown unto our 
fathers, and thy faithfulness continued unto their children : 
for the rich land given us for an inheritance, and the great 
power entrusted to the people ; for the fidelity of men set 
in authority, and the peace maintained by righteous laws; 
for protection against our enemies, and deliverance from 
inward strife; for an honorable place among the nations, 
and the promise of increasing strength. Lord, Thou has 
not dealt so with any people ; keep Thou the commonwealth 
beneath thy care, and guide the State according to thy will ; 
and thine shall be the glory and the praise and the thanks- 
giving, from generation to generation. Amen. 



For Our Allies 

O Lord, the God of all nations, we pray for our armies 
and navies, and for such as ride upon the wings of the 
wind. We pray Thee also for the nations allied with us 
in a great and holy cause. Already have they suffered 
much of bloodshed and sorrow. God grant to them that 
they may be strengthened by our comradeship and by the 
power of thy Spirit, that they may fight with manliness 
and vigor and attain a righteous victory. Bring peace to 
all nations, with righteousness and justice manifest to all 
tribes and peoples. For the sake of thy great name. Amen. 



Prayers and Prayer Poems 201 

For Sailors 

O eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heav- 
ens and rulest the raging of the sea; who hast compassed 
the waters with bounds, until day and night come to an 
end; be pleased to receive into thy almighty and most 
gracious protection the persons of us thy servants, our 
loved ones now at sea, and the ships in which they serve. 
Preserve them from the dangers of the sea, and from the 
violence of the enemy; that they may be a safeguard unto 
the United States of America, and a security for such as 
pass on the seas upon their lawful occasions; that the in- 
habitants of our land may in peace and quietness serve thee 
our God; and that they may return in safety to enjoy the 
blessings of the land, with the fruits of our labor; and, 
with a thankful remembrance of thy mercies, to praise and 
glorify thy holy Name, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Amen. 



For the Y. M. C. A. and for Chaplains 

Almighty God, we pray Thee for all who in thy name 
and in ours are ministering to our boys at the front. We 
pray for the chaplains, for the Young Men's Christian 
Association, for the Salvation Army, and for every agency 
which is endeavoring to preserve the normalities of life and 
to emphasize the valid claims of the spiritual life. God 
strengthen these men and women, and all the agencies of 
mercy and compassion. God make our boys strong and 
keep them clean and upright. We ask through thy love for 
us and them. Amen. 



202 Blue Stars and Gold 

For the Persecuted and Afflicted 

O God, who art mindful of thy children everywhere, 
reveal thy mercy unto all men, and remember, in thy great 
good-will, those for whom we now make intercession. 

Remember our Nation which Thou hast established, 
and bind together the whole body of the Commonwealth 
in the unity of brotherhood. 

Remember all the persecuted and afflicted; speak peace 
to the nations that are vexed with war and weary of blood- 
shed, and give victory to the right. 

Moreover, because the reins of government are in thy 
hands we beseech Thee to direct and bless all who are in 
lawful authority, especially thy servant, the President of 
the United States, and all others to whom the people have 
entrusted power, together with the whole body of the Com- 
monwealth: let thy fatherly favor so preserve them, and 
thy holy Spirit so govern their hearts, that religion may be 
purely maintained, and our land may abide in righteous- 
ness and peace, through Him who is the Prince of Peace. 
Amen. 



For Comfort 

O Thou who dwellest in heaven, mercifully regard all 
thy sorrowful and afflicted children upon earth, we beseech 
Thee. Draw near to them with the comfort of thy love, 
and sustain them by the right hand of thy power. Grant 
us a heart to sympathize with them in their distress, and 
give us both the opportunity and the will to help those who 
are in any trouble, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. 



Prayers and Prayer Poems 203 

For Desolate Lands and Stricken Peoples 

O God, we pray Thee for all lands that lie desolate, for 
Belgium and Poland and Armenia, and for all peoples 
upon whom have come the horrors of war, the violence of 
massacre, and the pain of famine and pestilence. Stay thou 
the enemy and the avenger, and bring to these and all 
nations the blessings of peace. Meantime, stir up the 
hearts of thy people in this land that they may make these 
calamities an occasion of mercy and benevolence, in the 
spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 



For Penitence 

O God, we humble ourselves before thy throne, asking 
Thee to pardon and forgive us for our many sins. Grant 
to our nation and to the people of our land repentance for 
our pride, our love of money, our political corruption, our 
every private sin and national shame. Thou hast made 
us a light-bearer to the nations. Let not the light that is 
in us be darkness. Cleanse our own land from every form 
of injustice and from greed and dishonor, that we may be 
a light to others. Make us worthy of our heritage, of the 
great names of our history, of the brave men who in the 
past have bled for us, and of those who in the present 
are bleeding for us. As the nations turn from the tyranny 
of kings, may they find in this nation new assurance of the 
purity and the safety of government by the people. May 
the voice of the people be the voice of God expressed in a 
clean ballot, in just laws, and in social justice. Amen. 



204 Blue Stars and Gold 

For the Destitute and Sorrowful 

O God, most merciful, who healest those that are broken 
in heart, and turnest the sadness of the sorrowful to joy, 
let thy Fatherly goodness be upon all that Thou hast made. 
Especially we beseech Thee to remember in pity such as 
are this day destitute, homeless, or forgotten of their fel- 
low-men. Bless the congregation of the poor. Uplift those 
who are cast down, mightily befriend innocent sufferers, 
and sanctify to them the endurance of their wrongs. Cheer 
with hope all discouraged and unhappy people, and by thy 
heavenly grace preserve from falling those whose penury 
tempteth them to sin. Though they be troubled on every 
side, suffer them not to be distressed; though they be 
perplexed, save them from despair. Grant this, O Lord, 
for the love of Him who for our sakes became poor, thy 
Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen. 

For Our Enemies 

O God, Thou hast taught us to love our enemies, yet 
Thou hast made it our duty to fight them. It is hard for 
us to do either of these things, and harder to do them both 
at once. We pray Thee for those with whom we are at 
war, that Thou wilt bring them through chastisement to a 
better mind, and we pray that while we fight, we may 
be kept from the corrosion of hatred. We pray that such 
blessings as we seek for our own nation may come to all 
nations. We pray Thee for the wounded, the suffering, 
the orphans, the widows of all nations. Bring peace to all 
lands, our Father, and restore to the earth the blessings of 
international good will. Through Christ our Lord, Amen. 



Prayers and Prayer Poems 205 

For Forgiveness 

Most merciful God, who art of purer eyes than to behold 
iniquity, and hast promised forgiveness to all those who 
confess and forsake their sins, we come before Thee in an 
humble sense of our own unworthiness, acknowledging our 
manifold transgressions of thy righteous laws. But, O 
gracious Father, who desirest not the deaths of a sinner, 
look upon us, we beseech Thee, in mercy, and forgive us 
all our transgressions. Make us deeply sensible of the 
great evil of them; and work in us an hearty contrition; 
that we may obtain forgiveness at thy hands, who are ever 
ready to receive humble and penitent sinners ; for the sake 
of thy Son Jesus Christ, our only Saviour and Redeemer. 
Amen* 

Before a Naval Engagement 

O most powerful and glorious Lord God, the Lord of 
hosts, that rulest and commandest all things ; Thou sittest 
in the throne judging right, and therefore we make our 
address to thy Divine Majesty in this our necessity, that 
Thou wouldest take the cause into thine own hand, and 
judge between us and our enemies. Stir up thy strength, 
O Lord, and come and help us; for Thou givest not alway 
the battle to the strong, but canst save by many or by few. 
O let not our sins now cry against us for vengeance; but 
hear us, thy poor servants, begging mercy and imploring 
thy help, and that Thou wouldst be a defense unto us 
against the face of the enemy. Make it appear that Thou 
art our Saviour and mighty Deliverer, through Jesus 
Christ our Lord. Amen. 



206 Blue Stars and Gold 

A Morning Supplication 

We praise Thee, O God, with the morning light, and in 
the brightness of a new day we bless thy holy Name. For 
all thou hast bestowed upon us with the gift of life, mak- 
ing us in thine own image, and granting us to share aa 
children in thy knowledge and thy love, in thy work and 
thy joy; we thank Thee, heavenly Father. For all good 
things in the world, for food and raiment, for home and 
friendship, for useful tasks and pure pleasures, we thank 
Thee, heavenly Father. For all spiritual blessings, for 
thy holy Word, for the Christian fellowship, for the good 
example and blessed memory of thy saints, for the secret 
influence of thy Spirit; we thank Thee, heavenly Father. 
And above all we praise and bless Thee for the life and 
death of thy dear Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen. 



For Protection 

O God, the Protector of all that trust in Thee, without 
whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; increase and 
multiply upon us thy mercy, that Thou, being our ruler and 
guide, we may so pass through things temporal that we 
may finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O 
Lord, most merciful, for the sake of thy dear Son, our 
Saviour. Amen, 



Prayers and Prayer Poems 207 

An Evening Supplication 

Almighty God, we beseech thee to continue thy gracious 
protection to us this night. Defend us from all dangers 
and mischiefs, and from the fear of them, that we may 
enjoy such refreshing sleep as may fit us for the duties of 
the following day. Make us ever mindful of the time 
when we shall lie down in the dust, and grant us grace 
always to live in such a state that we may never be afraid 
to die ; so that, living and dying, we may be thine, through 
the merits and satisfaction of thy Son Christ Jesus, in 
whose Name we offer up these our imperfect prayers. 
Amen. 



For Victory and Peace 

O God, the nations rage, and the people imagine a vain 
thing. Look in pity on the nations now at war, and for- 
give them for their hatred and their strife. Grant us peace 
in our time, O Lord. But bring peace only when it can 
come with the establishment of righteousness, the sanctity 
of treaties, and international honor and good will. Until 
then, give us patience and courage to sacrifice and to strive, 
till Thou shalt visit the earth with peace, and thy blessings 
shall be manifest to all nations. Amen, 



208 Blue Stars and Gold 

A Morning Thanksgiving 

Almighty and everlasting God, in whom we live and 
move and have our being, we, thy needy creatures, render 
Thee our humble praises, for thy preservation of us from 
the beginning of our lives to this day, and especially for 
having delivered us from the dangers of the past night. To 
thy watchful providence we owe it that no disturbance 
hath come nigh us or our dwelling ; but that we are brought 
in safety to the beginning of this day. For these thy 
mercies, we bless and magnify thy glorious Name, humbly 
beseeching thee to accept this our morning sacrifice of 
praise and thanksgiving, for His sake who lay down in 
the grave, and rose again for us, thy Son, our Saviour Jesus 
Christ. Amen, 



An Evening Petition 

O thou, who art the true Sun of the world, evermore 
rising, and never going down; who, by thy most whole- 
some appearing and light dost nourish and make joyful all 
things, as well that are in heaven, as also that are on earth : 
We beseech Thee mercifully and favorably to shine into 
our hearts, that the night and darkness of sin, and the 
mists of error on every side, being driven away. Thou, 
brightly shining within our hearts, we may all our life 
long go without any stumbling or offense, and may walk 
as in the daytime, being pure and clean from the works 
of darkness, and abounding in all good works which Thou 
hast prepared for us to walk in. Amen. 



Prayers and Prayer Poems 209 

Prayer for a World Hurt Sore 
By Margaret Widdemer 

Lord God, we lift to Thee 

A world hurt sore, 
Look down, and let it be 

Wounded no more! 

Lord, when this year is done 

That wakes to-day, 
Many shall pray to Thee 

Who do not pray ; 

Let all lips comfort them, 

All hearts be kind, 
They who this year shall leave 

Their joys behind; 

Give them Thy comforting, 

Help them to know 
That though their hopes are gone 

Thou dost not go ; 

They who shall give for Thee 

Lover and son, 
Show them Thy world set free, 

Thy battles done! 

Lord God, we lift to Thee 

A world in pain, 
Look down and let it be 

Made whole again! 



210 Blue Stars and Gold 

A Prayer in Wartime 

By John Oxenham 

Lord God of hosts, whose mighty hand 
Dominion holds on sea and land, 
In peace and war thy will we see 
Shaping the larger liberty. 
Nations may rise and nations fall, 
Thy changeless purpose rules them all. 

When death flies swift on wave or field, 
Be thou a sure defense and shield ; 
Console and succor those who fall, 
And help and hearten each and all. 
Oh, hear a people's prayers for those 
Who fearless face their country's foes : 

For those who weak and broken lie, 
In weariness and agony — 
Great Healer, to their beds of pain 
Come, touch and make them whole again. 
Oh, hear a people's prayers, and bless 
Thy servants in their hour of stress : 

For those to whom the call shall come 
We pray thy tender welcome home : 
The toil, the bitterness, all past, 
We trust them to thy love at last. 
Oh, hear a people's prayer for all 
Who, nobly striving, nobly fall : 



Prayers and Prayer Poems 211 

For those who minister and heal, 
And spend themselves, their ski 1 1, their zeal — 
Renew their hearts with Christlike faith, 
And guard them from disease and death, 
And in thine own good time, Lord, send 
Thy peace on earth till time shall end. 



Prayer of a Soldier in France 
By Joyce Kilmer 

Sergeant Joyce Kilmer was killed in action in France, 
August 1, 1918, while this book was in preparation. 

My shoulders ache beneath my pack. 

(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back.) 

I march with feet that burn and smart. 

(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart.) 

Men shout at me who may not speak. 

(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek.) 

I may not lift a hand to clear 

My eyes of salty drops that sear. 

(Then shall my fickle soul forget 

Thy agony of Bloody Sweat?) 

My rifle hand is stiff and numb. 

(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come.) 

Lord, Thou didst suffer more for me 

Than all the hosts of land and sea, 

So let me render back again 

This millionth of Thy gift. Amen. 



212 Blue Stars and Gold 

O God, Forgive ! 
By Madge E. Anderson 

God, forgive me that I fail to see 
The heroism now surrounding me, 

Nor count that hero great whose spirits fail 
Because his body poorly fed does quail 
Beneath a task which he is set to do — 
A task too hard for him — that we the few 
In idle ease on luxuries may live : 
My God, that we forget him, O, forgive. 

All day my brother labors in the field — 
Labors that the brown earth may richly yield 
Its strength of substance, that my life may live. 

1 do not think of him — O God, forgive. 
And this my sister in the sweat-shop stands, 

Her heart so human, struggling with weak hands, 
'Till death, more kind than life, says: "Cease to live.' 
O God, I thought not of her — O, forgive 

Within the heated depth of darkest mines, 
Ten thousand slaves of poverty one finds — 
They never see the sunshine. In the dark 
They labor on 'till death does stiffen stark 
Our brothers' forms. Let their starved spirits rise 
To life in light, in homes beyond the skies. 
We thought not of them, laboring to live — 
Remembering now, we pray: O God, forgive. 

Upon our streets the clubs our watchmen wield 
They wield for us, our safety, nor do yield ; 



Prayers and Prayer Poems 213 

No matter how their weary arms may ache 
Nor feel for needed rest, can they forsake 
A duty tedious, stale of interest, 
In care for you, for me, that none molest. 
Ah, thus from year to year we see them live, 
Yet never think of them : O God, forgive. 

The fireman rushing to the burning home, 
The seamen who o'er angry oceans roam, 
The builders of the iron-trails which link 
This world of men, from ocean's brink to brink, 
The men who swing great bridges high in air, 
And those whom pestilence can never scare — 
These all are heroes, and among us live. 
We seldom think of them — O God, forgive. 

A Battle Prayer 
By Edgar A. Guest 

God of battles, be with us now: 

Guard our sons from the lead of shame, 
Watch our sons when the cannons flame, 

Let them not to a tyrant bow. 

God of battles, to Thee we pray : 
Be with each loyal son who fights 
In the cause of justice and human rights, 

Grant him strength and lead the way. 

God of battles, our youth we give 
To the battle line on a foreign soil, 
To conquer hatred and lust and spoil ; 

Grant that they and their cause shall live. 



214 Blue Stars and Gold 



A Prayer for Those Who Watch 

By Theodosia Garrison 

We can not see beyond the flame, the black smoke's 

smother ; 
We only know they strive there, each beside the other, 
Our son and soldier, lover, husband, brother. 

We can not hear the battle-clash, the roaring of the guns ; 
We only know among them are the well-beloved ones, 
Those who made the world for us, lovers, husbands, sons. 

"Ours!" the heart within us cries. Nay, but these are more 

Even — men-at-arms of God who wage a holy war 

In the cause His soldier-saints fought and conquered for! 

Lord, for us, the waiting ones, watchers in the night, 
Change our selfish fears to pride, let us see aright 
The honor of the Service, the glory of the Fight ! 

Give us faith to know Thy sword was never bared in vain, 
Give us vision to behold, above the fields of pain, 
The splendor of the sacrifice that saves a world again ! 



Prayers and Prayer Poems 215 



A Father's Prayer 
By Margaret JViddemer 

Lord God, Who let Your Baby Son 

Pass earthward where the joys were few, 

To a hard death when all was done, 
And very far away from You, 

My little lad must go one day 

Roads where I cannot guide his feet, 

Through dangers that I cannot stay, 
To griefs I cannot help him meet. 

He must hear voices calling him — 

When youth is wild and life is warm 

And right seems far away and dim — 
To evil things and battle storm. 

Lord God, Whose Son went steadily 
Down the hard road He had to tread, 

Guard my son, too, that he may be 

Strong through his hours of doubt and dread ! 



216 Blue Stars and Gold 



A Prayer 

By Katharine Janeway Conger 

Is it too much to ask, that he I love 

Shall come back safe to me, 

That his young limbs be still as straight and strong, 

His brave young eyes still see? 

Is it too much, when countless women's hearts 
Mourn the beloved dead 
Or break to see torn bodies, crippled limbs, 
Eyes whence the light has fled ? 

Is it too much ; then, God, I would ask more ; 
That he come safe to Thee, 

His white young soul, unblemished and unscarred, 
March homeward strong and free. 



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